Why Organizations Must Double Down on CRM

Michael Ramsey, the GVP of Product Management, CRM, and Industry workflows at ServiceNow, explains why it’s more important than ever for companies to double down on their CRM investment. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

CRM software has become a staple of modern business, with roughly 90 percent of mid-sized companies already using some form of CRM system. But the real question is: Does the way these businesses currently use CRM (often focused narrowly on sales tracking or contact management) still meet the evolving, end-to-end needs of customer engagement, service, and success across the entire organization?

Too often, CRM is viewed narrowly as sales force automation (SFA)—a digital Rolodex or pipeline tracker. That view stems from SFA being the first productized segment of CRM, but it no longer fits today’s reality.

CRM now spans marketing, sales, and service, including field service, contact centers, and workforce management. A customer-centric CRM strategy starts with understanding the full customer lifecycle: discovering products (pre-sales), purchasing or renewing (sales), and post-sale interactions like fixing issues, modifying accounts, or disputing bills.

At each of these moments, customers engage with purpose. CRM should capture why they’re reaching out and empower teams to respond with context. This is modern CRM: a unified platform that delivers seamless, high-quality experiences across the entire journey, giving customers exactly what they want.

The Power of a Unified Platform Approach

Behind every successful customer experience is a well-orchestrated internal operation. But for many businesses, customer data lives in silos—marketing systems, support tools, billing platforms, spreadsheets. The result? Incomplete context, misaligned teams, and disjointed service. A unified platform approach connects the dots. It combines systems, data, and processes used by the front, middle, and back office, as well as sales, fulfillment, service, finance, and operations, so that work flows seamlessly.

Consider a national retailer with both e-commerce and physical stores. A customer orders online, then visits the store to ask about the status. If the CRM is connected across systems, the store associate can instantly access the customer’s complete order history, update shipping preferences, and log the interaction for future follow-up.

When systems are disconnected, these moments of truth become friction points. When systems are unified, they become opportunities to build loyalty. Crucially, this doesn’t mean ripping and replacing every legacy tool. A composable architecture lets organizations keep trusted tools, plug in what’s missing, and evolve at their own pace without disruption. That’s the kind of flexibility businesses need and the seamless service customers expect.

 AI-Driven Customer Experiences: Beyond the Hype

The future of CRM is intelligent. With the rise of artificial intelligence, businesses can now turn customer data into insight, and insight into action.

AI doesn’t just help teams work faster. It enables organizations to anticipate customer needs, personalize every interaction, and resolve issues before they escalate. Imagine a utility provider using AI to detect outage patterns in real-time, predict service disruptions, and automatically dispatch support, keeping customers informed without a single phone call.

Even more transformative is the rise of agentic AI. These AI agents don’t just handle simple tasks—they orchestrate entire workflows, from basic to highly complex. They understand context, take action, and collaborate with other agents and human team members to complete sophisticated processes.

For example, a telecom company might deploy AI agents to orchestrate device return workflows. These agents coordinate eligibility checks, shipping logistics, and refund processing while seamlessly handing off approval decisions to human agents when needed. The workflow infrastructure provides unified visibility, allowing teams to track performance across AI and human contributors and optimize KPIs in real-time. This is CRM powered by intelligence—proactive, scalable, and designed for human-AI collaboration.

Breaking Down the Front, Middle, and Back Office Divide

Truly great customer experiences require more than a polished digital customer engagement solution. Customer engagement points can look very different depending on the business. A retailer might rely on mobile apps and in-store staff, while a doctor, bank, or telecom company engages through portals, contact centers, or field service. That’s why an omnichannel CRM approach is critical: it ensures consistent, contextual experiences no matter where or how a customer engages.

Building CRM solutions that connect every function involved in delivering customer expectations, from sales and support to operations and finance, is critical to making that omnichannel approach a reality. A travel company recently integrated its booking, loyalty, and service tools. Now, when a traveler calls about a disruption, the agent can easily see how they’ve interacted with the company digitally to rebook flights, apply loyalty compensation, and follow up automatically. The customer sees one fluid experience, even though multiple departments and touchpoints are involved.

Removing these internal silos isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s a cultural shift. It means rethinking how teams collaborate and how platforms support that collaboration. The payoff is faster resolution, fewer errors, and a more cohesive brand experience.

Today’s customers want options. They might start with a chatbot, continue by phone, and follow up over email, all within the same interaction. A modern CRM must support these journeys without forcing customers to start over at every step. That means maintaining context across channels and ensuring every team member or AI agent can access the whole picture.

For example, a home goods retailer adopted omnichannel CRM tools that carry interaction history from chat to phone to store. As a result, they’ve reduced support times and improved customer satisfaction while lowering operating costs.

This approach isn’t about being everywhere at once. It’s about deeply understanding why customers engage with your brand, whether researching products, making a purchase, requesting service, or looking to renew or expand. A thoughtful CRM strategy organizes your business around those moments, making it easy to surface, capture, and fulfill requests efficiently and carefully. It’s about designing a customer experience that’s proactive, intentional, and always ready to meet them where they are.

A New Era of CRM

More than ever, customers judge companies based on how easy it is to interact with them. A well-orchestrated CRM strategy turns that ease into a competitive edge. This isn’t about checking a box or implementing software for its own sake. It’s about shifting from transactional thinking to relationship thinking—and building the infrastructure to support it.

CRM has the potential to be a strategic engine for delivering the experiences customers want across every phase of their journey. From pre-sales discovery to purchasing, fulfillment, service, and renewals, the goal is to support internal processes and create consistent, valuable experiences that make it easier for customers to get what they need.

Organizations that view CRM with this wider lens aren’t just more efficient; they’re more aligned to their customers’ real needs. They learn faster, adapt faster, and deliver better outcomes at scale. The companies that will lead in the years ahead are those that treat CRM not as a system of record or a departmental tool but as the foundation for orchestrating thoughtful, connected customer experiences.

In a world where expectations are higher and loyalty is harder to earn, doubling down on CRM isn’t just smart, it’s essential.