What Is High-Definition Customer Experience (HD-CX)?
Gartner, the global research and advisory firm, reported in June 2019 that the market for customer relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6% in 2018. That’s tremendous growth in just one year, and according to the firm’s research, CRM software is the largest and fastest-growing enterprise software application category.
With statistics like these, it’s easy to understand why the growth of CRM has exploded among businesses in all types of industries —in particular, manufacturing, finance, insurance, and staffing/recruiting.
At SugarCRM, small, medium-sized, and large businesses can benefit from products designed to help marketing, sales, and customer service teams get to the heart of their customers’ needs, and the newest initiative SugarCRM is introducing is HD-CX. Learn more about this exciting new software below.
What Is HD-CX?
HD-CX stands for High-Definition Customer Experience, and it’s what SugarCRM sees as the new standard in customer experience (CX). HD-CX helps companies achieve a view of their customers that’s crystal clear.
Think about it this way: Just as HD was introduced as the new standard for televisions in 1998, HD-CX aims to be something similar—the next frontier in CX so companies can see the future.
Acquisition of Node and SugarPredict
Before delving too deeply into what HD-CX does, it’s important to understand how SugarCRM arrived at this point. It started with Sugar’s acquisition of Node, a company that created the industry’s first AI-as-a-service platform. The platform lets companies:
- Build AI applications and features quickly
- Enable AI for applications that rely on data from people and customers
- Make better predictions and decisions that ultimately impact their bottom line
To put the product to the test, Sugar provided the company with a small cut of Sugar’s internal data to test how accurately it would be able to predict outcomes, and the results were even better than we could have expected.
To do this, Sugar provided three use-cases:
- The likelihood a marketing-qualified lead became sales-qualified
- The likelihood of a sales-qualified lead to won
- Predicting customers who were likely to churn
Even without the context of Sugar, the system constructed accurate models that validated what actually happened in each of the three use cases. After internal optimization and merging the technology with Sugar Sell first, SugarPredict unlocked the power of AI within CRM and revolutionized the market.
A New Frontier in CX
SugarPredict fits in seamlessly with Sugar’s existing time-aware CX platform. Sugar Discover, for example, enables a 360-degree view of the customer. And with HD-CX added to the mix, it serves as the missing piece of the whole time-aware system.
Predictive Insight
One valuable feature HD-CX offers is predictive insight. Whereas, before the Node acquisition, Sugar captured every historical detail about individual customers, now the AI component can analyze all that customer data and make predictions (offering predictive insight) into how a customer can be expected to behave when it comes to purchasing decisions. Having access to this data can empower businesses to make better choices, thereby boosting their bottom line.
HD-CX: It’s a New Standard, Not a Product
HD-CX aims to do for CRM what HD-TV did for televisions. When HD-TV broadcasts began, they raised the bar for what was considered an acceptable display on televisions, offering a higher resolution, minimal distortion, and colors that were truer to life.
The same principles can be applied to CRM and customer experiences with the introduction of HD-CX.
The Importance of Fidelity
When most companies look at their customer views, the image is decidedly pixelated. It may have information that’s out of date, incomplete, or inaccurate. How bad is the problem? Consider these statistics:
- 70% of customer data goes bad every year
- 91% of customer data is incomplete
- 18% is duplicate data, which results in wasted time and money to maintain and fix the errors
But what if you do have a good CRM? What if you already use Sugar? That’s a great step in the right direction, to be sure, but even a good customer view can still be limited.
Your understanding of your customers is limited to the data your company collects and is perhaps slightly skewed toward the metrics your business deemed important when your CRM was first implemented. And that’s fine.
But what information are you missing?
Out there in the world, there might be data that describes new customer segments who have a high likelihood to buy your product or service, identifies which of your customers are likely to churn, or provides answers to questions your business has about how it can be more successful.
And that’s where HD-CX comes in. HD-CX helps businesses achieve a clear and complete view of the customer through improved predictability with AI.
Why HD-CX Is Important
You might have access to all the information in the world about your customers, but it won’t do you any good if you can’t make sense of it. That’s where AI can help — within the HD-CX standard, AI provides predictive insights into what your customers are likely to do, identify trends, and goes beyond what the numbers say.
HD-CX offers historical records of change events in the buyer’s journey so you have full situational awareness of your customers and business. And now it can predict future outcomes.
Accurate predictions of customer behavior can help your company:
- Make better business decisions
- Manage risk
- Identify and respond to problems
- Identify and respond to opportunities
And it helps you do these things more quickly and more efficiently since these decisions ultimately impact your bottom line.
HD-CX also aims to minimize user effort and overhead through automation of data collection, processing, analysis, and presentation. Ultimately, it means your customer service staff spends more time engaging with customers and less time tracking down and entering customer information.
Incorporate Predictive Analytics with SugarCRM
At SugarCRM, we help businesses in all sorts of industries — from manufacturing to finance and staffing/recruiting to wealth management. If you want a more manageable, efficient way to grow your customer base, Sugar may have the solution you need for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams. Check out our case studies to read about the successes we’ve had with other companies and then contact us to request a demo.
