Can AI Transform the Future of Customer Relationship Management? Ft. Zac Sprackett, Chief Technology Officer at SugarCRM | Podcast Ep. 12

So, the importance of sort of building out that great team of people whose strengths kind of complement each other. At Mitel and VA Linux Systems, I had the opportunity to spend some time in sales roles, which was absolutely fantastic for me in that it taught me a lot about the customer and what they were looking for and what value meant to them specifically. And I find this really, really helpful today because it gets me out of my own head and it helps me to sort of put myself in the shoes of the customer.

It also taught me that no matter how much I think that I understand what the customer wants, I’m not the customer. Right. And, you know, you can have that sort of hubris of, you know, I look, I get it, I can empathize.

So, I know exactly what they’re feeling. But I think it’s a really interesting balance that that, you know, you have when you’re able to actually interact with those customers and really learn more about what they’re trying to achieve. So, I really appreciated that part of the role as well.

But recently at SugarCRM, you know, who I have been with sort of for 14 years, I’ve had the opportunity to sort of lead the product vision and strategy side of things as chief product officer and most recently transitioning into the role as a CTO, where I’m now responsible for sort of the wider technical vision of the organization and where we’re trying to go. I really just feel fortunate in general to have had all of these opportunities. And, you know, I love now the fact that I get to sort of focus on how do we leverage technology in a way that delivers value to our customers in tangible ways that help them to be more productive, help them to do a better job in servicing their customers and sort of all of the things that go into that.

Host: So, moving ahead, congratulations on winning the CRM Excellence Award for the fourth consecutive year. How do these recognitions assist in boosting SugarCRM’s overall performance?

Zac: Oh, thank you so much for recognizing that. I mean, we’re obviously incredibly proud of all of the different industry accolades and awards that we’ve earned over the years. But the CRM Excellence Award is particularly special to us, I think, because it’s a testament to our dedication to our customer base.

One of the things that I like about this award is that the judging process really focuses on the measurable value that the customers are achieving from an outcome perspective when they make use of our products. And I believe that winning this award consistently kind of shows that SugarCRM is among the innovation leaders. And we’re not just out there tracing the latest trend or trying to do the latest buzzword, but instead we’re committed to delivering that value over time on an ongoing basis to our customer base.

So, I really like that part. But it’s also a sign that our efforts around experience, intelligence and account management are kind of making a difference and resonating, helping with our global customer base, go out there and achieve their missions or slay their dragons. They really affirm the direction that we’re taking as a company.

But more importantly, and I think internally, the message that I like to use with my team is these things push us forward even further. Right. They affirm that we’re on the right path, but they also force us to just remember that, hey, the industry as a whole and products in general are changing.

And if we’re not out there pushing the boundaries and really trying to be innovative and customer centric, somebody else is going to come in and eat our lunch. So, they drive us in a lot of ways as well.

Host: So, Zac, with your diverse technological skills and understanding of business needs, how do you think organizations can ensure their technology meets to the client’s needs?

Zac: So, I’m going to give you actually a pretty low-tech answer in this, which may be surprising from a CTO. But I think a lot of organizations still overlook the sort of human side of technology and technology adoption. Even the most cutting-edge technology solutions today, change management and how you roll out change within an organization are still surprisingly big hurdles or challenges for organizations.

We all struggle to get our teams to kind of understand and embrace the new tools or the new technology that we’re bringing to them, often because we can’t answer sort of a critical question that’s important for those end users. Things like, you know, what’s in it for me? Right.

What do I get out? What’s the benefit for me as an individual for embracing this technology? And if I don’t understand that, if I don’t have that kind of context, it’s really hard for me to devote time and energy into those tools.

Right. So that that basic of like what’s in it for me is quite important to explain. You know, we’re all already completely overloaded.

We all have more responsibilities than we’ve probably ever had before. We’re expecting to keep more balls in the air than we’ve ever had to. We’re interacting with more customers on more channels, in more places, just a lot of challenges.

So, we really need to be able to articulate to those users who are sort of in the middle of all those expectations. Here’s the value. Here’s why this is important.

And here’s how we’re going to help you to do that. And at Sugar, we really focus on that idea in the products and services that we build, you know, data acquisition and activity capture. Right.

How do we automate the gathering of information that would otherwise require somebody to sit at their computer and manually type in or summarize for managers or those kinds of things? Those are sort of low, low value activities. And so, when we can automate those and free people up and give them more time to focus on the things that are much more high value, that’s an important thing for us to be able to do as a business for our customers.

Our products are able to actually automatically collect and capture a lot of that information that’s happening in interesting places, like in your email, in your calendar, where it’s where it’s the information is ultimately being created in the first place and get that to flow back into CRM. But it’s in other places as well throughout the organization, places like your ERP, where you know, all of the historical and transactional information that’s been happening in your business is gathering up. We can take those and turn them into value that gives sellers more information, gives them more tools to interact effectively with their customers for very, very little effort.

That sort of effort to value equation is incredibly important. So, coming back to the initial question, like how do you increase the amount of value that you’re able to give to that to that user and how do you decrease the amount of effort that’s required from them in order to to take advantage of that value?

Host: That’s a very interesting perspective. Moving ahead, as we all know, artificial intelligence is such a hot topic right now and it is changing so many industries. How is this technology making a difference in transforming customer experience?

Zac: Again, another great question. I mean, collectively, as businesses, we’re all feeling a ton of different pressures, right? We’ve got the need to provide more timely, accurate responses to our customers.

We want those responses to be incredibly consistent. We’ve got customer expectations that are on the rise. You know, everybody wants to have a personalized response that sort of feels targeted to them, that really understands, you know, the problems or the challenges that they have and they want us to communicate proactively.

I think AI can really help here when it’s applied effectively. You know, it already helps us to process large volumes of information, large volumes of data quickly and sort of understand what’s happening. It offers us the ability to make some predictions about the future.

It can help us to refine content on the fly in ways that were just, frankly, simply not even possible a few years ago. Right. The rise of some of these tools is giving us the ability to try new things or try things at a scale that we haven’t been able to do previously.

And at Sugar, we’ve deeply implemented AI throughout the entirety of our platform to help teams prioritize which opportunities to spend time on or to help markers prioritize the leads that are coming into the system, right? Which ones do you want to go after? With our recent acquisition of a company called SalesEye, we’ve actually brought some revenue intelligence capabilities to the platform that allow us to unlock the value that’s been hidden in places like ERP or finance systems in the organization.

We can now analyze all of the purchase history and highlight opportunities or identify risks and surface trends to sales teams. We can actually even help to predict which products or services their customers are most likely to purchase next and highlight opportunities that might otherwise have been missed. So, this is really cool.

But traditionally, it’s been really hard for people to kind of access this level of insight because maybe somebody who’s been around the business for an extended period of time, right? A sales veteran who’s been with the business 30 years, they might be able to intuit some of this stuff. But we’ve got younger people entering the workforce.

You’ve got people coming in from different careers. You’re trying to get that sort of level of information into the hands of people at varied levels. And that’s really, really been a challenge.

But AI is really helping to sort of level that playing field and sort of get everybody get everybody access to that level of information. We’ve also got this idea in CRM of this 360-degree view that we’ve been talking about for years. And I kind of always hated this term because it focuses on just like data and data is the important thing.

I don’t think that data is the important thing. I mean, I think that it’s useful. But we as individuals, when we’re interacting with customers, we actually can get overwhelmed by data.

There’s so much of it, right? How do you understand the 30 degrees of that 360-degree view that are relevant for the conversation that you’re about to have with the customer? And I think that’s where tools like AI can really help.

They can sort of bridge that gap and sort of pare things down to the part that’s important for that person who’s about to have the conversation with the customer in a way that is useful. And finally, there’s some concerns with AI that organizations have to deal with as well, right? We all got excited when large language models were made available, and we could start to experiment with them.

But IT departments and CISO organizations were starting to get concerned because you’ve got all of this business data that you’ve been building up over time and you’ve been collecting and curating over time. And it articulates kind of who you are as a business. And now you’re putting it out there in places where do I lose control of it?

How do I keep my arms wrapped around it? We’ve actually built out some tools that help to give organizations trust that their information is only used in ways that service their organization. It’s not being used to train models or any of those kinds of things as well.

Host: Thank you so much for those insights. So, moving on, Zac, as the CRM world keeps changing, what challenges do you think companies face today when it comes to managing their customer relationships?

Zac: I mean, that’s a big question. We’ve all got information that’s kind of coming at us from everywhere. We’ve got social media.

We’ve got email. We’ve got our calendar, web interactions. We’ve got connected devices and financial systems.

And we all spend a lot of time talking about how data is important. But let’s face it, it can be completely overwhelming, right? When data isn’t properly curated, when it’s not collected in a uniform way, when we don’t take the time to organize it or to understand it, companies can easily miss opportunities to add value to their customer base.

They can miss risks that are sort of developing. They can miss opportunities to engage in a way that sort of is proactive and exciting. Simply gathering information is no longer enough.

The customer journey has to surface all of the different insights from within that data and add value to the experience at every single one of the stops along the way. And frankly, that’s still kind of hard to do in some places. Customer expectations also continue to rise, right?

We’re all consumers and are personalized. We all have mobile devices. We all buy applications from the app store.

We navigate the world with our thumbs. And the amount of attention span that we have is kind of getting smaller. And these same sort of consumer trends are now transitioning into the B2B world as well.

So, businesses doing business with other businesses, they’re experiencing these same kinds of trends as well. And that’s driving the behavior and the expectations, even in a B2B marketplace. And if all of that wasn’t enough, you’ve got privacy regulations and those kinds of things that are evolving and expanding that present additional hurdles for marketers and sellers in terms of like, how do I ethically interact with the customer?

And what kind of data can I collect? And how do I store it? So, with so much of this stuff changing, it can be a challenge to really stay focused on understanding that customer journey.

And businesses have silos. We have different departments. We’re handing off the responsibility between the different departments for the customer.

Organizations still today kind of struggle to create that seamless, unified customer experience that eliminates those silos or makes it feel like those silos don’t exist when you’re interacting with the customer.

Host: So, adding on to customer relationships, what features do you think are necessary for marketing, sales, and service teams to build better relationships with the customers?

Zac: Yeah, I think having up-to-date and accurate information available at their fingertips is kind of critical. And the best way to do that, again, is to sort of automatically capture and update that information from all of the different places that it’s actually being created. So directly in your email inbox, directly in your calendar, in your social media, third party platforms, ERP, finance platforms, all of those kinds of places, ensuring that the information that’s being created or accessed in those places is automatically captured and pulled back and filed inside of CRM is critical and fundamental.

The seamless integration across these different communication channels is also really important. Whether you’re interacting with the customer over email or the phone or social media doesn’t really matter. The customer experience needs to feel the same.

And the customer expects that they’re going to get the same experience regardless of which channel they happen to be contacting you on today. So, they expect that you understand the context of who they are and what they want and what they’re trying to achieve. So being able to blend all of those things together is really important.

I would recommend that businesses need to prioritize automation that reduces manual effort, such as data entry or follow-up scheduling. We want our teams to be really focused on high-value activities and not to get bogged down in things that don’t add value to the business. So, when the system or the tools that you use are able to manage the legwork, our employees are actually able to spend more time doing things that we want them to do, like building that sort of genuine relationship and delivering that exceptional service to the customer.

And I guess finally, businesses shouldn’t discount the importance of time. Customer relationships ebb and flow over time. You know, you don’t start at the destination.

It takes a period of time for you to get there. Recording all of the fluctuations or all of the different interactions that are having with the customer over time is incredibly useful for making better predictions about the future and understanding exactly what got your business to the point that it’s at today. So, knowing things like when a customer last interacted with your company, when they’re due for a follow-up or when an issue might escalate, allows teams to be more proactive in terms of how they approach those customers and the kind of value that they’re able to deliver.

Host: So, as we move into our last segment, what is your perspective on the future of customer relationship management? And what advice would you give to tech and CRM practitioners who want to make a real impact?

Zac: Look, we already see more importance being placed on integration, integrating systems, orchestration of information between systems. CRM systems are expected to connect and coordinate seamlessly across a wider range of tools and platforms than ever before. You know, social media, finance, email, calendar, as I’ve said, all the way even to IoT devices out in the field deployed at customer sites.

CRM systems operate at the core and provide that sort of comprehensive view of the customer, helping to orchestrate those cross-departmental playbooks and workflows within your business. So, the future of CRM is really about connected, intelligent, and proactive insight being delivered into the hands of those users who are interacting with customers on a daily basis. And AI and machine learning are going to evolve to help to gather better insight, to drive deeper personalization, and to help companies and individuals within those companies make better decisions.

The future CRM is going to anticipate customer needs and offer predictive insight. It’s going to enable you to make more proactive outreach and create just-in-time content that’s really beneficial to the user, to the end customer who’s trying to achieve something. And companies that are able to understand this and get ahead of the curve, I think, are the ones that are going to thrive in this sort of modern CRM universe.

The only constant, I would say, in our industry has changed. It’s changed a ton over the years. And it feels like it’s evolving even more rapidly recently.

So staying relevant means being curious. It means acquiring new skills. It means experimenting with new trends and figuring out what are the pieces that are useful and helpful to me and my business and help to push my business forward.

I guess one of the things that a mentor told me once early in my career is that a lot of the hard technology problems are long solved. And a lot of what’s left are sort of the interpersonal human relationship problems. And I think that in a surprising number of situations, that is still true today.

Navigating the human element is really the most interesting part of solving problems. And when we’re talking about building relationships with customers, it is a human problem. And technology can help us to scale.

But remember, it is a human problem. We’re interacting with humans on the other side of things. I guess the final thing that I would say is for any new technologists who are kind of entering the industry, it’s a great industry.

Giving me a ton of opportunity. It has been a really, really fun journey over the years. I would encourage anybody who’s interested in sort of joining into CRM and technology just to stay curious, never stop learning, and keep the customer at the center of what you do, right?

Keep trying to solve the needs of that end customer. Technology is a means to an end. And how you leverage that technology to solve problems is what really is going to differentiate you and your business in the industry as a whole.

Host: Well, thank you so much, Zac, for sharing your valuable insights and experiences with us today. It was a real pleasure to host you and learn more about the incredible work being done at SugarCRM. Once again, thank you so much.

Zac: Thank you for having me. It’s been great.

Host: Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. We hope you found this conversation inspiring. Stay tuned for our next episode where we will share more tips from the top experts.

I am your host, Sayali, signing off. See you soon in the next episode of ExtraMile by HiTechNectar. Stay tuned and keep exploring.