Forget the CRM headache with blockchain Apps

Customer relationship management systems (CRM) are one of the most powerful tools ever created to help managers and entrepreneurs to grow their businesses. CRM is enabling them to track sales leads, turn leads into closed sales faster, manage customer support issues and better market products to customers – to mention only a few things such a system can do.

But what about building customer relationship with blockchain applications?

Implementing a CRM system can be difficult as many business leaders find it very hard to figure out what different CRM systems do, perceive that CRM is too costly and too complex to use, and often they don’t have enough resources for a proper implementation. And this is the case especially for small enterprises.

For larger companies, CRM systems pose other kind of challenges, mainly ones related to the data these systems manage. And main problems here are missing key information, out-of-date information or incorrect data. CRM data often contains gaps in information, as customer information changes often or the data wasn’t properly verified since the beginning. Even if CRM data is up-to-date and accurate, if it remains just data without providing insights (which are crucial in effectively reaching the customers) these data are virtually useless.

But things are about to change for business leaders running both small and large enterprises as the blockchain-enabled applications are already out of the gate and promise to fundamentally change the way businesses (and not only) operate. This include the management of customer relationship.

But what exactly blockchain and Smart Contracts can do to improve the CRM systems?

The great potential of blockchain and customer relationship with Smart Contracts comes from their ability to provide companies with solution for better securing their back-office applications and corporate data, while extracting more valuable insights from their data.

Currently, many small and medium-sized businesses are overwhelmed by the process of creating legal contracts. As this process is based on word processing, it requires sales persons to rekey data already stored on a CRM system in order to create a legal contract, thus ending in doubling the work and wasting valuable time. With Smart Contracts, this problem disappears, as sellers can auto-populate them with data in the form they already are on the CRM platform.

Moreover, besides providing an automated tool for creating the contract framework, blockchain also allows you to build rules and set criteria based on which provision will be automatically added or removed. Let’s say you want to remove the auto-renewal provision from a contract if a certain price threshold comes across. With a Smart Contracts you don’t have to continuously monitor this parameter and manually change the provision on the CRM platform, because a smart contract will automatically enforce the rule you have previously set. Smart Contracts also improve the workflow within the organization by alerting other departments of any new contract executions. Thus you can save time and reduce risks.

Another source of concern for companies in regard with CRM platforms is the data security. But security is the most important feature of the blockchain technology. Blockchain enables companies to create verifiable and secure CRM records. And securing verifiable records should be a particular concern to companies that get their customer data from a range of sources, whether internal data, data available online or subscription databases.

Going forward, blockchain enables businesses to have a 360-degree view of the current state of your customers, which makes it a great tool for understanding demand and making an informed decision in regard to where to deploy your resources. CRM with blockchain, empowers you with a granular view of demand – an invaluable competitive advantage over your market rivals. And this in turn leads to improvements in customer experience, which is an important differentiator in many industries. The secure nature of blockchain allows for secure mobile apps and customer retention programs that can be quite difficult for customers and malicious hackers to game for their own benefit.

Since the beginning, blockchain generated a significant interest among the financial system and the payments industry, due to the promise to reduce costs and increase security. But the financial system is in the same time one of the most regulated industries and blockchain could help in complying with regulations, too. Banks and other financial institutions will be able to use Smart Contracts on CRM systems to automate the support of regulated processes where they must use specific steps and comply with specific laws and regulations.

New regulations, like the new Payments Service Directive (PSD2) in Europe, are also challenging the payments industry, as the traditional players in this field will have to open their solutions to customer and partners. Blockchain could be a potential solution for securing data in these solutions and is a definite fit for payments industry give its requirements for information assurance and fraud protection.

Although the potential of blockchain technology in the area of CRM platforms came to light only recently the future looks undeniably bright. Expect to see real use cases of blockchain and CRM in a matter of months rather than years, especially in heavy customer transaction industries like retail and in companies that have international sales. Because blockchain promises to solve a problem that kept going for a long time in these industries: the customers’ fret over data security. And those who will be able to offer customers the greater peace of mind about making online purchases through blockchain will be the winners of tomorrow.

Brace yourselves for what the future is going to bring!