How do successful brands stand out from the rest of the crowd? It's a constant and unending focus on customer experience. Customers play such an important role that organizations rely on customer data and analytics to best understand customer behavior and what gets them all the way to the end of the sales funnel. The customer management and analytics software market is so healthy that they are now divided into two distinct categories: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Customer Experience Management (CEM) At first glance, these two appear to be apps in the same category, as they both capture and manage customer information. In fact, many businesses still confuse the two, often questioning the importance of CEM when they already use CRM software to capture and analyze customer information.

As you dive into their core functionality, you quickly discover that they were designed with different goals in mind. Let's take a closer look at what customer relationship management and customer experience management, CRM and CEM are, and how they provide businesses with valuable customer insights that lead to more sales and better relationships. What is customer relationship management? Customer Relationship Management or CRM refers to the different practices, strategies and guidelines used to manage a company's customer interactions. The goal is to analyze and make informed decisions to improve the overall customer experience, increase retention and drive sales into the business.

Furthermore, CRM as a technology can help businesses to interact with customers from all aspects of the customer life cycle. This enables the team to "engage with customers, predict customer needs, identify customer updates and track performance goals in terms of sales." At the end of the day, CRM brings together sales, marketing, and customer support by analyzing customer data. It collects core customer information from a variety of channels (e.g. your business website, email, brick-and-mortar stores) and provides you with valuable insights into how your sales cycle, marketing campaigns and customer acquisition strategies are performing, as well as other customer engagement metrics.