Anatomy of a CRM System

On CRM and CX

In my opinion this is one of the harder business-systems patterns to outline via and anatomy.

• CRMs often focus more on static data with communications-related automation
• CX often focus more on data automations, especially with content and partner services

Customer experience / Personalization

• Commucations and outreach
• Engagement (datetime, element, location)
• Surveys, active feedback
• Persona / Trait modeling, tagging, schema
• Lifecycles
• Compliance

Sales Ops

• Work queues
• Team metrics, performance
• Permissioning, regionality
• Compensation mertics
• Data quality nudges
• Contextual narrative, scripts, with commenting

Integrations / Automations

• Synchronization admin (frequency, volumes, exclusions, permissioning)
• Activity data
• Marketplace partners
• Integrators / services
• First-party data admin, segmentation
• Call center
• Project management tooling
• CMS

Dashboards and Reporting

• Self-service data and queries
• Visualization programming (D3, etc)
• Embeddability
• Work queues
• Lifecycle congestion
• Data quality
• Per-customer journey timelines

Leads Modeling

• Customizable model fields
• Customizable screens
• Relations between models
• Scoring
• Privacy
• Channel preferences
• Needs / promises

Generic

Common things that are usually provided, but need attention during administration

• Data schema versioning for models
• Data versioning and lineage. Rollbacks
• Security integrations, monitoring
• MDM
• RBACs or permissioning for screens, models, fields, etc

References