Bridging Business and Technology: The Role of CRM in Digital Transformation

Abstract

Recently, digital change has been one of the top concerns of most enterprises as they struggle with rapidly changing markets and customer requirements going up further, as well as technology getting better and better. The major part of this change is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which, nowadays, is regarded as the real source of generating the business value rather than just serving as a secondary source of business data. This article discusses the ways in which CRM can be effectively used as a support tool of business strategy, a link between the business goals and the capabilities of the technology, which could allow digital transformation to finally happen. Besides, it points out the fact that it is necessary to integrate different platforms, the relevance of using real-time as well as past data for well-informed decision-making, and the coming of a personalized and seamless customer experience. The research comprises examining the CRM systems through their theoretical and practical aspects. For this, the study has combined the literature review, the conceptual analysis, and the case study as methods. The outcome of this work points to a trend where the organizations that are implementing the state-of-the-art and open-ended CRM platform architectures that mainly incorporate the concepts of cloud computing, business analytics, and artificial intelligence can better adapt to the changes of the market, gain a higher level of efficiency in operations, and develop strong and lasting relationships with their clients. On top of that, the article presents some of the most recognizable challenges, which include data silos, integration complexity, and resistance of the organization, and at the same time, it suggests the way to solve these issues as well.