The rapid evolution of technology today has resulted in many new roles and job scopes across industries. Technical CRM is among the many nascent fields that are gaining momentum in Europe and globally.
We spoke to Melissa Mostowys (Melissa), Technical CRM Manager at Kaia Health (a leading digital therapeutics company), on her experiences as a CRM Tech and Lifecycle Strategist, and why Technical CRM will be increasingly relevant for businesses now and in the future.
What’s Inside?
- Melissa Mostowys’s Career Journey
- CRM is More Than Email
- Difference Between CRM Tech and Traditional CRM
- Why CRM Tech is Increasingly Important
- Improving Business Through Enhanced Understanding of Customers
- Lessons Learned
Melissa Mostowys’s Career Journey
Melissa started out as a student in the aviation industry, but eventually charted a career as a CRM specialist with expertise in Tech and Lifecycle Strategy.
As an aviation student, Melissa had a habit of going to the airport to study. There, she usually indulged in people-watching, and observing the different kinds of characters and traveller behaviours. It was this interest in the psychology of people that led Melissa to the world of CRM.
Between 2019 and 2020, Melissa was the CRM Specialist & Innovation Ambassador for eDreams ODIGEO, a Spanish online travel company. There, she played a key role in increasing the European travel and ecommerce business’s subscription base, from 500k to 1.2million subscribers.
Melissa had further success with Cara Care as a Technical CRM growth specialist, where her strategy to enhance CRM with Data Science insights led to a 30% revenue boost for the Berlin-based Medical Equipment Manufacturing business.
Now she’s the Technical CRM Manager for Kaia Health where she shares speedy CRM solutions with the rest of the company based on her wealth of accumulated knowledge and experience with CRM tools and their specific benefits.
CRM is More Than Email
A common misconception about CRM is that it is only emails and newsletters. Melissa believes that such a generalisation of CRM does not reflect the powerful way it can help to bring forward ideas, identify gaps and analyse customer patterns.
“CRM is not simply putting together a few images and content for newsletter dissemination. It’s an omni-channel approach which has a progressive or aligned communication throughout different channels and preferred channels of the customers. We can even identify, for example, a customer’s preferred channel to be reached on,” said Melissa.
She added that CRM tools can contribute towards overall efficiency and create a hyper-personalised targeting campaign at the same time. “I’m currently involved in a head developer workshop that gives me a better understanding of how to work with powerful CRM tools.”
Her mission is to spread more awareness about CRM while continuously educating her peers of all the ways they could leverage CRM within their teams.
At the moment, Melissa’s role and interest lie in the health sector. She hopes to discover unique ways in which CRM Tech can uplift businesses in the health sector and hopefully discover benefits for customers who are seeking better, faster and more personalised health solutions.
Difference Between CRM Tech and Traditional CRM
A CRM Tech role acts as the interface between tech and marketing. According to Melissa, many CRM Tech professionals have experience in operations or executing marketing campaigns. They also commonly have a passion for technology and innovation.
The topics they deal with include API integrations, managing data processes and data utilisation. Melissa says, “We also look into integrating additional tools or services such as an analytics tool, optimising the CRM processes and ensuring that a CRM system is being fully utilised for its capabilities…We are constantly innovating to improve further. Knowledge of some coding languages for segmenting, with SQL querying or JavaScript, HTML can be a big plus.”
For Melissa, being in CRM Tech means ensuring that teams have functioning tools to execute their ideas and also have access to quality data when needed.
“I’m a huge fan of empowering the whole CRM team to understand their campaigns and analyse the right KPIs. It’s also about pushing teams to become more tech savvy, enabling them to be aware of what we can actually do with data and how to leverage more with their CRM tool. We help to make sure the team has the right data to bring their wonderful ideas to life,” exclaimed Melissa.
A CRM Tech role typically also involves proposing innovative ideas and technologies that a traditional CRM manager may not have thought of or known about.
Melissa, however, pointed out that one does not have to be a developer to get into CRM Tech. Her own past experience was in creating content and marketing campaigns. While becoming familiar with the technology and technical aspects of setting up a CRM system, she gained an understanding of the requirements and challenges of the different teams she worked with.
Melissa asserted that, “It’s important to have an interest in both worlds and understand the language of both worlds…If you’re flexible, open to various job responsibilities, are hungry to learn and explore and you’re not afraid of technology, you can get into pretty much everything.”
Why CRM Tech is Increasingly Important
Integrating a CRM tool can be an expensive and time-consuming project for businesses. There are challenges and complications in the many cross-functional tasks to be covered.
A CRM Tech professional would be able to assist by helping to make the most of a CRM system through their knowledge of the finer details and inner workings of CRM tools.
In Melissa’s experience with Cara Care, she helped to build requirement metrics to identify the most crucial operational uses and technical requirements of a CRM tool.
She then evaluated more than 50 tools based on the metrics and collaborated with members of the operations and development teams, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the tools.
“This definitely prepared me for the current role I’m in. The health sector is a bit tricky when it comes to data protection. My expertise can assist in time-saving through the proposition of CRM solutions that are faster,” said Melissa.
Improving Business Through Enhanced Understanding of Customers
In the course of her career, Melissa found that CRM Tech’s collaboration with various teams contributed to the overall success of a business.
One of the memorable strategies in her playbook was using a prediction model to identify the likelihood customers would make additional purchases. This type of model and the associated conversion strategy required many data points to function properly.
The insights and learnings that ultimately contributed to the overall increase in revenue and reduction of churn rate, however, were derived based on a collaborative approach with various teams such as the Product, Customer Service and UX teams.
“We work collaboratively to support product journeys with CRM lifecycles, identifying gaps where customers get stuck or gaps based on where we lose people,” Melissa explained. “It’s interesting to recognise behaviours and identify what data is needed to support the CRM use case.”
Melissa further observed that, “This allows us to get a map of different segments and carry out workshops where we can delve further into how people feel at different stages of the customer journey. From there we can explore ideas contributed by the different teams involved and give feedback on the possibilities based on existing databases or our behavioural pattern analysis.”
She added that CRM plays a vital function in Marketing and Product but also contributes to the business.
“Although our main goal is not directly to generate more money, we play a defining part in retaining people through the study and analysis of their shopping journeys,” Melissa asserted.
According to Melissa, a perfect system is hard to achieve and almost non-existent but she has learned to appreciate the benefits of integrating data properly. “Understanding data in your CRM software and pairing it like a recipe with customer insights draws out the human experience that customers want and need”, she added.
She also said that creating meaningful and valuable connections between customers and businesses is just as important as the value of the product itself.
Lessons Learned
| 1 | CRM is not simply putting together a few images and content for newsletter dissemination. It’s an omni-channel approach which has a progressive or aligned communication throughout different channels and preferred channels of the customers. |
| 2 | A perfect system is hard to achieve and almost non-existent. One should learn to appreciate the benefits of integrating data properly. |
| 3 | Understanding data in your CRM software and pairing it like a recipe with customer insights draws out the human experience that customers want and need. |
Next Steps
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