Going beyond business solutions

During May Fusion5ers from across Australia & NZ did their sugar-fuelled best to raise money, awareness, and support for Breast Cancer.  We had pink ribbon breakfasts with the Kiwis, and ‘Biggest Morning Teas’ with the Aussies, and everyone showed up with gusto! With this cruel disease impacting so many people we all know, this cause is near and dear to our hearts, and we’re very proud to support the cause.

Continuing on our cake eating binge, we celebrated the launch of the new Fusion5 brand with cakes and cupcakes across both countries…with all this calorific indulgence, we might have to start training for Steptember sooner rather than later!

We’re going to be ‘out and about’ a bit this year, so if you’re planning on coming to any of these events, be sure to swing by and say hi at our booths!

• CIO Summit Sydney – 26 June
• CIO Summit Auckland – 19 and 20 August

Over the last few weeks, Fusion5ers have been rubbing shoulders with the best of the best from around the globe, soaking up as well as sharing ideas and insights, and helping shaping ‘what next’ for the technology and transformation communities. Not to mention some of our thought-leaders have been gaining a following with their contributions to the AI knowledge-verse.

By Kristy Brown (CEO - New Zealand)

To put it bluntly, the writing is on the wall for your business or organisation if you’re not: 

1. Already using AI-enabled CRM, or

2. Adopting it in the very near future 

Earlier this year, I shared my prediction that if you’re not already gearing up to leverage the power of AI in 2025, you’re already falling behind your competitors. And six months into the year, I stand behind that statement.

Those businesses that have embraced AI-enabled CRM are making their mark with significantly improved service and operations. Alongside these recent AI adopters are the disruptive new players in the market. They’re digital natives who have intuitively adopted AI-enhanced software (from CRM to HR, marketing, operations, and finance) as standard. To them, the business value of AI is a given; it’s as essential as having a website or using cloud technology. 

Traditional CRM – and why it’s not going to get you ahead of the game

Core CRM implementations have, up until now, involved us setting up numerous forms to capture data, including contact details, sales, problems, and feedback, which may or may not trigger a workflow. 

The problem with traditional CRM is that its functionality is reactive. For example, a customer submits a complaint via a web form or through your support centre. But what next? Based on the information you’ve been tracking in the CRM, how can you effectively segment the customer’s issue to deliver them both a tailored message and a speedy resolution?

Today’s digitally savvy customers expect more. They anticipate (almost) immediate delivery, fully trackable orders, and applications, requests or claims that are accessed within minutes, not days or weeks. 

What was considered ‘acceptable’ five years ago now feels like an archaic level of service. And if you’re not matching the performance of your competitors, your customer will hold it against you and move on. 

Life’s better with Agentic AI – some real-life examples

Let’s look at an example of the difference a customer-facing solution with Agentic AI makes. In just three months, we implemented Dynamics 365 Contact Centre with its generative AI capabilities for Public Trust, New Zealand's largest provider of wills and estate administration services. The result?

• Significantly faster call handling, reducing average times across the board

• Clear uplift in customer sentiment and experience

• Cut call recording search time from 20 minutes to just seconds

• Slashed IVR change turnaround from weeks to less than a day

Another example is that of a local government organisation, which turned to us to improve their customer service. The task of routing their cases to the right humans required two full-time employees. Now, it’s done (accurately and efficiently) in moments using AI, and the organisation has regained the services of those two employees to add value through other value-adding constituent-facing activities.

The world of Agentic AI – and AI in general – has significantly changed the goalposts when it comes to CRM; moreover, it has also dramatically shifted the expectations of how customers expect to be serviced.

Changing up the sales conversation

One of the most disruptive areas to think about in the world of AI and CRM is your sales process. In April of this year, Microsoft released two incredible autonomous workloads that impact the way we sell. The first is a qualification agent, and the other, a sales research agent. 

The qualification agent enables your CRM to autonomously review your sales data and qualify the leads that you have (from whatever source). So, there’s no longer any need to add to your BDRs’ workload by expecting them to go through your leads and rank them according to where they fall in the sales funnel.

The sales research agent is designed for those tasked with responding to bids. This agent can apply deep reasoning to its responses, and defaults to the most complex responses first, then sanity tests its own answer.  

Both of these agents demonstrate how AI will transform a traditional sales approach into a smarter, faster, and more effective process. And if you’re not adopting them, you’re going to quickly be outbid by your competitors if they are working with these autonomous tools.

The lesson is clear: 

AI and CRM are no longer separate disciplines; together, they are the operating system of modern business. Delay adoption and you invite irrelevance. Embrace it now and you’ll not only survive - but you’ll also set the pace everyone else must follow.

By Sven Martin (CEO - Australia)

From my perspective as CEO, the ability to see macro trends is critical. Knowledge is power - and that’s why I love CRM.

While our line managers are looking at the minutia of what's happening this week, next week or next month, and our general managers are looking at the next six-month phase, I’m typically looking further out into the horizon. To the next year, and the one after that. 

Our CRM helps me to understand and manage: 

1. Pipeline performance

A significant portion of my work involves analysing comparative periods from CRM data. The sales reporting indicates whether our pipeline meets the coverage level necessary for us to have a good chance of meeting our target this year. And if not? In that case, we know we need to actively intervene and change potential outcomes.

2. Sales performance

One aspect I closely examine in our CRM reporting is performance based on individual sellers. By identifying specific areas of weakness (where I know other salespeople are routinely more successful), it gives me the heads-up that we need to arrange additional training or engage the support of a coach or mentor for that person.

3. Product performance

Here, I use the CRM’s trend analysis reporting to identify products that are declining in popularity despite our continued marketing investment. A drop off in customer interest indicates to me that we need to consider the life cycle of that product and think about how (and if) we can revitalise its position in, and appeal to, the market. 

4. Cost to serve

Analysis tools help me to track case resolution times, and effort spent resolving issues. With the case categorisation I can easily see the root cause of our costly issues, and ensure our improvement efforts are focused in the right areas, improving our customer experience, and ensuring we’re as efficient as we can be for our customers.

5. Customer sentiment

With the new AI features embedded in CRM, I have access to leading indicators that track customer satisfaction trends and highlight issues that might have otherwise been overlooked in their data. I can even receive alerts on a micro level for our highly strategic customers.  

How is this useful? It allows me to track their performance closely, so if there are any emerging issues, we can proactively intervene. Not only does that make for happier customers, but it reduces the ‘important things to mitigate’ pile on my desk. Which as you can imagine, is always welcome. 

Another key metric I follow is customer churn, and the relationship with customer sentiment. This assists in crafting our customer experience improvement initiatives, and building business cases for investment in this area.

By Jacob Gunzburg (CFO)

As a CFO, I’ve spent most of my career elbow-deep in ERP migrations. Sound familiar?

You’ll doubtless know that when you bring a new company into the fold, the first order of business is always to move its general ledger onto your core platform. This is obviously because the cost of running parallel books is untenable as you rack up duplicate effort, unreliable numbers, and sleepless nights before board meetings.

But strangely enough, the same urgency is seldom applied to CRMs.

For example, I’ve been in the position where, after a few acquisitions, the business has ended up with four, five, or even six CRMs – and none of them talk to one another. From where I’m sitting, the damage done by disparate CRMs is every bit as real as running multiple ERPs.

How can too many CRMs negatively impact your role and business?

The impact on profitability analysis 

My team looks at margin by product, customer segment and region. If the data lives in five different CRMs, we’re forced to spend days stitching CSV files together before we can even ask “Which customers are eroding margin?” or “Which services are ripe for cross-sell?” And that’s all valuable time we’re not analysing, forecasting or acting.

Worse, the moment you consolidate by hand, you introduce risk; one bad lookup and your board deck is wrong.

Fumbling with forecasting 

Pipeline data should flow straight from Sales to Finance so you can translate tomorrow’s opportunities into next quarter’s cash-flow model. Right? However, if you’re relying on multiple standalone CRMs, it’s likely that each sales leader will send you a different spreadsheet, each with its own probability logic. 
As a result, you end up with a ‘forecast’ that’s really a diplomatic average.

The cost no one calculates - brand damage 

With siloed CRMs, your prospects can receive three invitations to the same webinar, or worse, three conflicting messages from separate product teams. Beyond the embarrassment, it signals to the market that your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing.

I have experienced this first-hand; however, after a painful, company-wide cleanse and migration to a single CRM, the payoff was immediate. Marketing spend dropped because we finally saw which campaigns actually converted. Our gross margin improved as we identified low-value segments we’d been focusing on out of habit. Most importantly, Finance, Sales and Marketing started the quarter on the same numbers - and finished there.

From where I’m sitting

If you’re willing to make a significant investment to integrate your ERPs, then carve out the time and budget to do the same for your CRM. With clean data, one system, and universal adoption, not only will your sales team be happy, but your finance team will also have the long-awaited clarity they need to drive growth.

And that, from a CFO’s perspective, is the only ROI that counts.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the endless ‘doing’ of marketing and lose sight of how your CRM can improve your critical thinking and decision-making.

All too often, we take our CRM’s capabilities for granted, underutilise it, or even fail to enable it to do its job properly. Is it time for a rethink?

1. CRM tells you what's really working and what's not. 

Typically, we treat CRMs as a system of record. As marketers, we associate our CRM contacts and prospects with a campaign, quantify our efforts, and eventually equate the outcomes with pipeline growth.

But what if we use CRM data to tell a different story? One that reports on the number of activities generated, but also tells you that while campaign #1 was well-received and generated lots of leads, campaign #2 performed comparatively poorly - but had a much higher conversion rate? 

By setting up your CRM to meet business goals (typically bottom line), you’re focussing on high-value conversions instead of number-generating activity.

Learnings: 

Your CRM can help you stop chasing vanity metrics and start investing in what genuinely drives growth. 

2. CRM reveals the cracks before customers fall through them.

Your sales, marketing, and customer success teams depend on your CRM to do their jobs, ensuring that balls aren’t dropped, and opportunities aren’t missed. As marketers, you leverage your CRM to nurture prospects and measure engagement as they progress through the sales funnel to potentially emerge as hard-won customers. 

Of course, you can use your CRM to continue engaging with your customers through strategic conversations and content that generates ongoing interest and loyalty - rather than just plugging the holes between account manager or support calls. 

By using your CRM to measure customer engagement and sentiment throughout the lifecycle, it’s easier to identify if, where, and when the relationship is faltering and act before a crack turns into a crevasse. 

Learnings: 

Your CRM is more than a tool for storing data. It's a way to build trust between your sales, marketing and success teams while keeping the customer at the centre. 

3. CRM shows you where to grow next (not just to optimise what you've already got).

By examining the patterns of engagement across your best customers, you can uncover new segments to target. Or, you may find you’re overinvesting in a segment with low conversion levels - or high conversion but low ongoing growth. 

For example, it’s easy to make the mistake of perceiving “X” sector as a prime target (because you already have a high number of “X” customers). However, quantity doesn’t necessarily deliver growth. 

Learnings: 

Your CRM can be a powerful strategy tool if you use it to ask smarter questions, not just pull reports which pat you on the back.

Summary:

If you’re using CRM to collect all the ones and zeros but not then using that data to inform your next moves, it’s all the harder to make strategic decisions about how to engage with and grow your customer base.