Ask any business leader, and they’ll tell you that yes, of course, they want loyal customers. But the path from prospect to loyal customer is not a straight line. In fact, it’s fraught with twists and turns, and one wrong move could cause people—even repeat customers—to wander in another direction.

If you asked someone 30 years ago what customer relationship management (CRM) meant, you’d get a very different answer than if you asked that question today. Back then, says Jon Aniano, vice president of product at Zendesk, CRM was a process for tracking sales. It was simply a way for your sales team to get visibility into their sales pipeline and understand how the business might be doing over the next quarter, next month, next year.

Congrats — you have a product or service that people appreciate enough to pay for. But your offering, even if it’s the very best, is not enough to guarantee that your customers are going to keep on being your customers. In order to cultivate customer loyalty, an essential component of your success, you have to also cultivate solid relationships with your customers. A huge part of any relationship, of course, is communication.

Work from home has us feeling isolated and stir-crazy. We hope you can nerd out and lose yourself in this month’s integration bonanza.

You probably can’t imagine life without your smartphone. You can just say “Hey Siri, call Mom” and instantly the number is dialed for you. Be honest, do you know Mom’s phone number? It’s practically impossible to remember all of your contacts’ information, and because your phone manages details like a personal assistant, you don’t have to.

Building and maintaining great customer relationships is at the core of any good business model. But staying on top of who your customers are and what their relationship with your business is at any given moment is difficult. And that’s true across the board—whether you’re a small business with a hundred customers or a large one with hundreds of thousands.

Over the past 30 years, the term customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved with the times—what was once seen as a tool designed to provide visibility into a company’s sales pipeline has morphed into something much more powerful. At its heart, CRM is about managing current and potential customer relationships by collecting and analyzing data.

With the coronavirus outbreak, customer experience teams across the globe are having to rapidly adapt amid ticket spikes, customer cancellations, market volatility, and increased uncertainty. Each week, the world is changing, and business simply isn’t business as usual. Most teams responding to customers are transitioning to a work from home environment, putting additional strain on their ability to respond to customers effectively. For many of us, that means learning and adjusting as we go.

Every second your customer spends waiting on hold with support is a second they’re closer to switching to your competitor. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020, long wait times top the list of what makes for a bad customer service experience. However, there is a solution to those delays in service, one that customers increasingly expect: automated customer service.

When most people think of live chat, they think of customer support. But it’s also a sales rep’s secret weapon. That’s because chat provides a direct line between a rep and their prospective customers. Sales teams can use chat to generate leads, improve sales conversion rates, and identify upsell opportunities.