Steve Oriola, CEO of Insightly by Unbounce, explains why a human touch is still essential in a marketplace where AI-driven CRM systems are king. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Customer loyalty remains the ultimate performance metric. True loyalty isn’t a single transaction; it’s the repeat choice, the ongoing renewal, and the advocacy that follows a great experience. While human connection is the foundation of that loyalty, artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how organizations can scale it. CRMs exist to create and retain relationships. It’s the only software tool with “relationship” in the name. And while we seek to leverage AI in many ways, we can’t move too far in the direction of automation.

In today’s digital ecosystem, AI powers everything from creation to analysis. The key to the next generation of customer experience (CX) won’t be choosing between efficiency and empathy, but about achieving the right balance between the two.

The Dual Edge of AI in CX

AI is transforming the way businesses understand and engage with customers. Modern CRM and marketing automation platforms are now equipped with built-in AI capabilities that can analyze behaviour patterns, detect buying intent, and automate personalized outreach at scale. This level of efficiency drives faster service and reduces operational friction. Customers benefit from instant answers and seamless processes. But it also introduces a risk: automation without empathy.

Automated systems, when left unchecked, can miss nuance or fail to interpret emotional tone. Overreliance on AI can make interactions feel cold and transactional, eroding the trust and emotional connection that drive retention.

With over a decade of experience innovating with CRM, I’ve found that any type of automation works best when it amplifies human judgment, rather than replacing it. Businesses that deploy AI thoughtfully design workflows where technology supports empathy, rather than competing with it. The data backs this up. A recent Zurich study (2025) found that 73 percent of consumers avoid businesses that don’t demonstrate empathy, proving that even in a digital-first environment, emotional intelligence remains a decisive differentiator.

Building AI-Driven CRM Strategies Without Losing Trust

AI is redefining what customer relationship management (CRM) means. Beyond data organization, CRMs are evolving into intelligence platforms that can surface actionable insights and predict future outcomes. Here’s how leading organizations are leveraging AI for smarter, trust-centered engagement:

• Predictive revenue intelligence. AI-driven scoring models identify which prospects are most likely to close, helping teams focus on the highest-value opportunities.
• Sentiment and intent analysis. Natural language processing tools analyze tone, emotion, and urgency across communications, helping teams respond with empathy and precision.
• Automated health alerts. Machine learning models can identify at-risk customers based on low engagement or negative sentiment signals, enabling proactive outreach before churn occurs.

However, transparency is key. Customers must be aware when they’re interacting with AI and have clear pathways to human support when necessary. Trust is not built by hiding automation but by making it a known, seamless extension of human-led service.

Designing Workflows Where Automation Enhances Human Value

Automation should never replace human skill, but it can and should remove the friction that prevents humans from doing their best work. AI excels at routine and repetitive tasks, such as summarizing emails, scheduling follow-ups, or updating deal stages. Humans excel at empathy, problem-solving, and strategic insight.

In high-performing CX organizations, these two forces work together. For example:

• AI chatbots can handle FAQs or gather context before routing prospects to live sales representatives, reducing response time while enabling salespeople to focus on high-value opportunities.
• Marketing teams can automate data capture and lead scoring while focusing on creative campaigns, relationship building, and tailored proposals.

The best workflows are built around a simple rule: automate what doesn’t require empathy, and invest human energy where it does.

Leaders also need to invest in AI literacy across teams. Training employees to understand how AI surfaces insights—and how to act on them—ensures that adoption doesn’t feel threatening, but rather empowering.

The Future of CX: Human Empathy, Supercharged by AI

The evolution of customer experience depends on maintaining equilibrium—data with empathy, speed with sincerity. AI will continue to reduce the manual workload and accelerate responsiveness, but empathy will always be the differentiator that keeps customers loyal. Leaders must not only decide what to automate, but also consciously define what should remain human.

In the end, AI can make you faster, but empathy makes you unforgettable. The organizations that master both will lead the next era of customer experience—one where technology doesn’t replace humanity, but enables it at scale.

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The editors at Solutions Review have compiled a summary of the Act! Advantage features that can help small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) create a smarter, more connected front office.

Maintaining an organized and connected front office environment is easier said than done. Whether it’s keeping your sales and marketing teams aligned, curating memorable experiences for customers, or ensuring all your technology platforms are speaking to each other, companies of any size are bound to have their hands full. While smaller businesses might have more flexibility in how they manage their processes, they also tend to have tighter margins that require them to do more with less, as the classic saying goes.

That’s where a platform provider like Act! can help. With the Act! Advantage solution suite, SMBs can centralize their customer data, sales, marketing processes, website, accounting system, and business apps to provide teams with the unified ecosystem they need to succeed and thrive in competitive markets. With that in mind, the Solutions Review editorial team outlined some of the key features that make Act! uniquely equipped to help SMBs transform their front office functions.

How Act! Advantage Can Improve Front Office Processes

Centralized Customer Data

Customer data fragmentation can be one of the most expensive operational failures modern businesses encounter. When customer information exists across multiple systems, spreadsheets, email folders, and individual team members’ files, organizations are forced to operate with incomplete intelligence about their most valuable asset. Act! Advantage aims to eliminate that fragmentation with user-friendly data centralization that makes it easy for teams to track calls, emails, notes, tasks, documents, quotes, and other information from a single, organized place.

For example, Act!’s contact management system goes beyond basic name and phone number storage by capturing and organizing everything from communication history to purchase patterns, interaction preferences, and more. Centralizing these data sets will empower front office teams to access customer profiles and pinpoint the insights they’re looking for without wasting time hunting for information across multiple sources.

The platform’s Custom Industry Tables are another feature engineered to provide teams with the insights they need to develop targeted sales and marketing strategies. Specifically, these Tables can help users across departments:

• Gain additional insights into customers by associating support contracts, service engagements, and more with individual contacts.
• Manage business and customer data with spreadsheet-like tables.
• Create targeted sales campaigns that leverage the insights gathered from Act! Custom Industry Tables.
• Leverage pre-built industry and job-specific templates to get started faster.

Attract New Prospects

Prospect attraction with Act! goes outside traditional lead generation approaches by implementing systematic methodologies that optimize every touchpoint in the prospect journey. The platform’s primary tools for attracting new prospects are its email marketing and automation capabilities. Its email marketing features are a highlight of the platform, as they make it easier than ever for users of all experience levels to create custom, professional-level emails. Those features include over 170 sample templates, a drag-and-drop interface requiring no formal coding skills, a visual workflow designer, drip marketing campaigns, and real-time email performance metrics for tracking opens, clicks, bounces, and other relevant data.

Act! Advantage’s email marketing tools integrate seamlessly with its marketing automation capabilities. Together, these feature suites empower businesses to turn their digital marketing engagement efforts into prioritized sales activities in real-time. It does this by scoring leads based on their engagement with marketing materials (i.e., emails, lead forms, surveys), automatically creating activities to ensure rapid follow-ups, and developing a closed-loop connection between sales and marketing teams to ensure each team focuses its attention where it’s most valuable.

Convert Relationships Into Sales

Relationship conversion is a critical function within front office operations, which is why Act! provides teams with the structural framework necessary to turn the interpersonal connections created by the marketing team into revenue-generating transactions. With features for opportunity tracking, pipeline management, interactive quotes, and sales process management, Act! helps sales and marketing teams forecast confidently and keep prospective customers moving through the sales funnel.

These collaboration-centric features are crucial to ensuring that every customer relationship will benefit from organizational knowledge instead of relying solely on individual sales representative capabilities. When team members can share prospect intelligence, coordinate multi-person sales efforts, drive follow-ups, and maintain continuity when account ownership transfers occur, they’ll set their business and its customers up for continued success.

Maintain Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty can be the most cost-effective growth strategy available to organizations, yet traditional front office operations often neglect systematic retention efforts in favor of new customer acquisition activities. The customer relationship doesn’t stop at a sale, and failing to prioritize that relationship after a sales conversion can result in higher customer turnover. To help, Act! Advantage provides multiple capabilities for maintaining proactive loyalty programs that protect revenue and create expansion opportunities. These tools include:

• Response-driven nurture marketing capabilities analyze customer response patterns to email campaigns, content engagement, and communication preferences to create personalized retention sequences. This response-driven approach adapts messaging frequency, content type, and communication channels based on individual customer behavior rather than applying uniform retention strategies across diverse customer segments.
• Website activity tracking enables front office teams to recognize customers whose digital engagement patterns suggest declining loyalty before traditional metrics would detect problems. The Act! Advantage platform will correlate website activity with purchase history and support interactions to create comprehensive loyalty risk assessments that trigger proactive retention interventions.
• Progressive profiling functionality enhances loyalty maintenance by continuously expanding customer knowledge through strategic information collection. Act! gradually builds comprehensive customer profiles through multiple touchpoints over extended periods to capture evolving customer preferences, changing business requirements, and shifting decision criteria that influence loyalty and retention.
• Asset tracking within the Act! makes it easy to maintain detailed records of customer-owned assets, including purchase dates, warranty information, service histories, and upgrade opportunities.

Learn More About How Act! Can Improve Your Front Office Processes

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The editors at Solutions Review have compiled the following list to spotlight some of the best webinar platforms and solutions technology vendors should consider using for their virtual event needs.

Webinars and virtual events have become a fundamental part of modern marketing strategy, so much so that they are rarely optional add-ons but requirements for success. However, as valuable as these offerings are, they are a relatively new addition to the marketing industry, so not every company is outfitted with the tools and resources it needs to develop, host, launch, and market a virtual event. Webinars can be especially valuable for software vendors, as their products are best advertised through live demonstrations of the features and interface their solution offers.

To help your company identify the best webinar platforms for your brand, our editors have compiled a list spotlighting a few of the industry’s leading providers. The webinar platform providers have been selected due to the diversity of their features, general acclaim from users, and relevance in today’s changing market.

The Best Webinar Platforms and Virtual Event Solutions

StreamYard

Description: StreamYard is an all-in-one platform that makes it easy for teams to go live and create professional-quality livestreams, recordings, podcasts, and webinars directly from a web browser. The platform even allows users to launch their streams to social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn Live. Other features include local recording support to maintain crystal-clear audio, easy screen-sharing, and the On-Air tool, which can be embedded on a website, handle registrations, and streamline how businesses promote content to their target audiences.

Airmeet

Description: Airmeet is an AI-powered webinar and virtual event platform designed to empower marketers, recruiters, and event organizers with the resources they need to create experiences that blend seamless technology with meaningful human interaction. The platform can be configured for multiple use cases and industries, making it a flexible, reliable solution for businesses targeting different demographics with unique, engaging virtual experiences. Its webinar-specific features include custom branding tools, breakout rooms, rule-based networking, audience segmentation, and more.

Zoom

Description: Zoom is an “AI-first” work platform built to bring teams together, engage audiences, delight customers, and reimagine modern workspaces. As part of its extensive solution suite, Zoom offers online webinar functionalities that enable teams to quickly set up a webinar that gives attendees the familiar experience they’re used to. Its webinar-specific features include built-in Q&A functionalities, custom branding tools, real-time audience sentiment tracking, multi-camera support, large attendee capacities, performance reports, and integration with leading CRM and marketing platforms.

WebinarNinja

Description: WebinarNinja is a popular platform for coaches, consultants, businesses, and trainers. It aims to help users leverage webinars and video-based courses to teach online, grow their business with interactive webinars, and maximize their marketing efforts. Features include an intuitive user interface, up to 1,000 live attendees per webinar, unlimited attendees for automated webinars, support for multiple presenters, tools for offering replay access, high-definition video streaming, custom templates, and built-in engagement tools, including polls, quizzes, handouts, and offers.

GoTo

Description: GoTo is a cloud communications and IT company that delivers secure, AI-enabled solutions to small and mid-size businesses worldwide. Included in its product suite is an “all-in-one” virtual event platform for webinars, online conferences, remote employee trainings, product demos, and more. Businesses can use GoTo’s webinar platform to create custom registration forms, pre-record webinars, monitor audience participation with an Engagement Dashboard, track event analytics, accept payments with Stripe, create multi-presenter webinars, automate event outreach, and streamline processes.

Wistia

Description: Wistia is a video marketing platform built to help teams across markets create, host, market, and measure the impact of their videos and webinars. With its tools, marketers can create professional-looking videos, host webinars, collect leads, and send those leads to their marketing automation platform. For example, Wistia’s webinar-specific capabilities will streamline the process of scheduling or pre-recording webinars, tracking engagement, adding registrants to email lists or marketing campaigns, personalizing post-event outreach,  and even repurposing recorded webinars for additional content.

Livestorm

Description: Livestorm is a top-rated, ISO 27001-certified solution for organizing and hosting multiple types of webinars, including product demos, online training courses, live marketing events, internal meetings, live Q&As, and more. Its webinar-specific tools include custom registration pages, event analytics built into the platform dashboard, customizable polls, breakout rooms, branded layouts, virtual whiteboards, multi-language support, and integration with CRM and marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.

Zoho Meeting

Description: Zoho is a multinational company specializing in software development, cloud computing, and web-based business tools. Included in its comprehensive solution suite is Zoho Meeting, an online meeting and webinar platform that helps companies connect, collaborate, work remotely, manage online meetings, and stream live webinars. Additional features include screen sharing, whiteboards, custom registration forms, YouTube livestreaming, and file sharing. Companies can also use Zoho Webinar, another product to help brands conduct large-scale virtual conferences, host online courses, convert leads with marketing webinars, and more.

LiveWebinar

Description: LiveWebinar is a cloud-based solution equipped with live video streaming, recording, screen sharing, customized branding, audience engagement analytics, and social media broadcasting capabilities. The platform’s browser-based design and interoperability mean users can host or join meetings from any device, including laptops, smartphones, tablets, and even smart TVs. It also offers a collection of promotional tools and analytics, ranging from custom forms to source tracking, file storage, one-click registrations, social media livestreaming, and custom branding.

BigMarker

Description: BigMarker is a customizable platform for webinars, virtual, and hybrid events. It helps companies, organizations, and universities host highly customized live, on-demand, automated presentations, trainings, and events to create and maintain meaningful conversations and relationships with prospects, customers, and other stakeholders. BigMarker’s webinar-specific features include HD screen-sharing, breakout rooms, whiteboarding tools, dial-in telephony, no presenter limits, and support for up to 50,000 attendees.

GetResponse

Description: GetResponse is an “all-in-one” marketing solution designed to help marketers, small business owners, solopreneurs, and creators grow their audience with easy-to-use email marketing, marketing automation, and content monetization tools. Included in those tools is a no-download, easy-to-use webinar builder. With this tool, users can manage events with up to 1,000 live attendees, host unlimited webinars, store up to 20 hours of recordings, run automated nurturing campaigns, automatically follow up with audiences, design custom registration pages, use chats to enable live conversations, and use recorded webinars as lead generation tools.

Demio

Description: Demio is a webinar platform built to help marketers engage and convert their audiences through live conversations. With live, on-demand, and automated webinar offerings, Demio enables teams to curate virtual experiences that build relationships with an audience. Demio’s webinar tools include branded email notifications, engagement analytics, webinar data tracking, integration with leading CRM platforms, custom registration fields, branded features, and more.

Riverside

Description: Riverside is a platform built from the ground up for content creation. With support for audio and visual content, Riverside can help teams of all sizes create high-quality experiences for multiple audiences. Its webinar suite offers full HD streaming, AI-powered editing tools, real-time sign-up tracking, custom landing pages, automated follow-up emails, built-in Q&A flows, support for up to 10,000 live attendees, AI-powered transcriptions, and the option to simulcast to LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, all while recording locally.

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Ljubiša Velikić, the VP of Trust & Safety at TELUS Digital, explains why digital leaders must develop a security strategy that combines human expertise with technology to stay competitive in the future of CX. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

As generative AI (GenAI) continues to reshape digital experiences in all areas of our lives, trust is increasingly becoming the key factor driving sustainable business growth and success. Today’s brands are under mounting pressure to deliver customized experiences, even as consumers become more conscious of the inherent privacy risks associated with sharing their personal data. For enterprise decision-makers, balancing these diametrically opposed demands requires an approach that fuses human oversight with technological safeguards.

Forward-thinking digital leaders are no longer treating trust as a compliance issue but elevating it as a core driver of customer loyalty, market differentiation, and sustained revenue growth through stronger retention and brand reputation. As digital threats grow more complex and regulations evolve, business leaders invest in trust and safety to not just manage risk but also strengthen customer relationships and competitive advantage.

Recent findings from TELUS Digital’s Safety in Numbers report, conducted in partnership with Ryan Strategic Advisory, underscore this shift.

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The editors at Solutions Review have compiled the following list to spotlight some of the best custom webinar service providers for software vendors to consider working with for their virtual event needs.

It’s hard to think back to when virtual events and webinars weren’t a fundamental part of modern marketing. However, they’re a newer addition to the standard toolkit than the tried-and-true classics like social media and email marketing. With the explosion of virtual events, custom webinar services have become essential to any successful marketing strategy, regardless of industry focus or business size.

To help you identify the best webinar service providers and virtual event management companies for your brand, our editors have compiled a list to spotlight some of the industry’s leading providers. The listed service providers have been selected due to the diversity of their features, general acclaim from users, and relevance in today’s market.

The Best Custom Webinar Service Providers for Software Vendors

Solutions Review

Description: Over 10 million IT executives, directors, and decision makers come to the Solutions Review collection of enterprise technology sites every year, and with the addition of Insight Jam, that reach has only grown. There are over one million subscribers between the Solutions Review and Insight Jam YouTube accounts, making it easier than ever to create targeted, custom webinar experiences that connect leading software vendors from multiple industries with their target audience. Solution Review’s experienced, in-house production and audience outreach teams will optimize the content and event marketing to reach the right audiences at the right time.

Demio

Description: Demio is a webinar platform built to help marketers engage and convert their audiences through live conversations. With live, on-demand, and automated webinar offerings, Demio enables teams to curate virtual experiences that build relationships with an audience. Demio’s webinar tools include branded email notifications, engagement analytics, webinar data tracking, integration with leading CRM platforms, custom registration fields, branded features, and more.

GPJ

Description: George P. Johnson (GPJ) is a global strategic experience marketing agency that provides clients with integrated experiential programs that leverage digital, mobile, and physical brand activations. The company’s virtual and hybrid event services can help businesses of all sizes to amplify their message, empower sales teams with actionable analytics, support multiple events across portfolios, and maximize audience reach. GPJ has an in-house production team with experience managing virtual broadcasts, streaming, set design, production, direction, and content creation.

BigMarker

Description: BigMarker is a customizable platform for webinars, virtual, and hybrid events. It helps companies, organizations, and universities host highly-customized live, on-demand, automated presentations, trainings, and events to create and maintain meaningful conversations and relationships with prospects, customers, and other stakeholders. BigMarker’s webinar-specific features include HD screen-sharing, breakout rooms, whiteboarding tools, dial-in telephony, no presenter limits, and support for up to 50,000 attendees.

TSI Consultants

Description: TSI Consultants is a digital marketing firm specializing in services and solutions for companies in the insurance industry. Alongside its inbound sales, inbound marketing, consultation, and HubSpot-specific offerings, TSI Consultants provides several live and on-demand webinar production and management services to help clients stay engaged with their audiences. Those services include webinar hosting, marketing promotion, custom slide designs, moderation, rehearsals, conversation outlines, and more.

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Siba Padhy, the Head of Salesforce Business at EPAM Systems, Inc., outlines why the three pillars of customer loyalty depend on establishing the “why,” “who,” and “how.” This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Modern consumers expect personalized experiences and will abandon brands that fail to deliver them. While all brands recognize the necessity of such experiences, many companies struggle to form a comprehensive view of their customers, and an even higher number struggle to deliver contextually relevant, personalized customer experiences.

Companies recognize that they need to take loyalty more seriously—the problem is that they don’t know where to start. This article explores how customer data platforms (CDPs), AI agents, and machine learning (ML) tools can solve this challenge.

Outline the “Why: Behind Customer Loyalty

First, it is crucial to outline the “why” behind customer loyalty. Loyalty is meant to increase customer lifetime value, acquire more customers, increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction, etc. These outcomes are interrelated and will influence each other in some way. It is also important to align on frameworks that help define customer lifetime value and identify key growth drivers. A well-established value capability matrix (KPI tree) is essential to connect these value drivers with measurable outcomes. By setting up a feedback loop, organizations can also measure the impact of loyalty initiatives and make continuous improvements utilizing pre-established lagging and leading indicators.

Establish the “Who”

To truly understand their customers, brands must first identify “who” the customer is, which requires building a unified view of each individual, collecting attribute, engagement, and interaction data across touchpoints. Accessing this data across all departments is essential for delivering personalized and compelling customer experiences.

A CDP solution integrates an enterprise’s customer data from sales, commerce, marketing, contact center, and other systems into a single, easily accessible source of truth. This platform merges every detail, from demographic information to behavioral insights, to help brands achieve a 360-degree view of their customers. Without a CDP, a company may have multiple versions of the same customer across different systems, sometimes in the same system. A CDP resolves this identity dilemma with direct or fuzzy matches to create one unified record for that customer, such as determining that three email addresses and two different physical addresses belong to the same person.

A CDP can also help companies enhance and enrich their data. For example, by connecting a CDP with various external and internal data points, brands can ascertain a customer’s total lifetime value, including their preferred channels of engagement, favorite products, and other behaviors like price sensitivities.

In addition to CDPs, marketers can use tools like conversational AI agents to give them a list of customers who fit a specific criterion, anywhere between one and over two dozen dimensions. These dimensions could include demographics, location, purchase history, etc. Utilizing AI and ML models on top of this data acts as a catalyst where a CDP not only creates insights but also can recommend the next best actions for various roles within the organization to bolster customer loyalty.

Customer Engagement: The “How”

Now that an enterprise understands its customers, it is time to determine “how” it will engage with them. While customer loyalty can be enabled in many ways, the most common engagement types are:

• Point-based loyalty management
• Tier-based loyalty management

The drivers behind these types of loyalty management can be simple tracking based on customer spending behavior and habits, gamification, or an ecosystem of partners. It is also worth noting that many point-based systems ultimately transfer to some form of tier-based system as a customer progresses along a loyalty program.

Starbucks, for example, uses a gamified point-based system where customers get promotions based on their purchases, encouraging them to make more purchases. Alternatively, Marriott’s Bonvoy program uses a tier-based approach, where points lead to tiers, and there is very little gamification. Marriott also expanded its loyalty program with a partner ecosystem. Marriott allows members to use points on airlines and rental cars; likewise, certain credit cards give members points.

The “How” Continued: Customer Segments and Journeys

It stands to reason that the highest tier customers of nine years want to feel different and should receive a more personalized experience than someone who just became a member. As such, successful loyalty programs segment customers accordingly, providing them with tailored experiences. With a CDP, brands can harness customer data to create cohorts or segments of customers. They can then place those groups into corresponding marketing or promotion journeys.

For example, a customer spending a significant amount of money on a website should go on a different marketing or promotion journey than someone who merely pops up on the website once a year. A CDP allows organizations to uncover these pivotal data points and tie customer segments directly to specific marketing journeys with reward structures associated with their unique attributes and behavioral patterns.

Some advanced CDPs, like Salesforce Data Cloud, have powerful generative AI capabilities that can generate sets of segments based on data, accelerating the creation of customer segments. AI agents can also recommend that marketers actively target certain customer segments with promotions and other incentives. Specifically, these agents examine the CDP data to determine which customer segments have the highest response rates, conversion rates, etc., and then place them on journeys powered by self-learning AI and ML tools.

Case in Point: Modernizing Customer Loyalty

A global sunglasses retailer wanted to create a 360-degree view of its customers to support better segmentation and targeted marketing. However, its legacy marketing platform left much to be desired, as it could not provide the essential capabilities necessary to automate its loyalty program based on real-time data. To achieve its mission, the retailer partnered with a digital engineering and transformation services specialist to implement a CDP using Salesforce Data Cloud.

The partner helped modernize the retailer’s business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing and loyalty initiatives. This enabled it to gain a holistic view of the customer and segment based on real-time behavioral or transactional data. The solution also included AI-powered engagement, helping the retailer deliver timely, personalized customer journeys with the right messages to correct customer segments.

Additionally, an automated feedback loop to Salesforce Data Cloud permitted the retailer to maintain the 360-degree customer view from both a B2B and B2C perspective. In the end, the retailer increased customer satisfaction by 20 percent while boosting campaign return on investment and improving marketer productivity and campaign speed to market.

Finding a Business and Tech Savvy Partner

Building a successful customer loyalty program can be an enormous task, requiring a comprehensive understanding of the business, associated processes, and relevant technical tools that help solve strategic and complex challenges. Getting help from a partner who possesses such expertise is a critical first step in the journey.

The right partner can assess holistic customer engagement models to align loyalty goals with broader business objectives and develop a corresponding roadmap with well-defined checkpoints and processes to measure impact. Likewise, an experienced partner can help streamline the implementation of solutions like CDPs and AI agents.

A partner with deep technical expertise in data is also necessary to understand the relevant data domains, establish the right data governance, create a unified customer 360-degree view, and expose insights to the best channels for activation with the correct feedback loops. This approach ensures customer loyalty solutions will be measurable and adaptable, while delivering personalized experiences at scale to increase customer engagement, loyalty, and lifetime value.

The post The Three Pillars of Customer Loyalty: Why, Who, and How appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

Derek Slager, co-founder and CTO of Amperity, explains why AI agents are only as smart as the data they’re built on. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

AI agents are transforming how work gets done. From digital concierges and customer support bots to marketing assistants and supply chain optimizers, vendors are racing to launch next-generation tools that analyze and act on data in real-time. But as their capabilities grow, one critical blind spot threatens their reliability: the fragmented, inconsistent data foundations they’re built on.

Too often, AI agents are launched on fractured, siloed, and usually outdated data, creating gaps or inaccuracies. Without a solid data foundation, agents can struggle with everything from customer relevance to regulatory compliance. When decisions are being made and executed in real-time, intelligent agents need the best data available to deliver reliable outcomes.

AI Agents Need Clean, Connected Data

AI agents are designed to process and act on large volumes of data in real-time. However, these results are limited when customer information lives in disconnected systems, such as CRMs, point-of-sale platforms, loyalty databases, advertising tools, and service systems, which are all structured and updated differently.

For example, AI agents used for customer engagement must be able to reliably trigger a workflow. But if the agent isn’t working from a solid and accurate data foundation, it might surface an irrelevant offer, ignore a service issue, or send a communication to the wrong customer. Although AI agents are intended for optimization, they become a liability if they use inaccurate data.

A connected data layer is critical, but connection alone isn’t enough. Agents need a unified, contextual view of each customer to act intelligently, something only robust identity resolution can provide.

AI Agents are Changing the Identity Resolution Equation

Identity resolution has long been considered a prerequisite for customer engagement and hyper-personalization. But that’s no longer the whole story. With the emergence of agentic AI, identity resolution is being reimagined as a process that can be actively fueled and accelerated by intelligent agents.

Instead of depending on rigid matching rules or static configuration, AI agents can now overhaul identity resolution directly. They can ingest high-volume datasets across systems and stitch together fragmented customer records into unified profiles. These agents can analyze signals like names, behaviors, email addresses, and more using machine learning to determine which records belong to a single individual with unprecedented speed. This shift drastically improves the accuracy and agility of identity resolution, explaining the “why” behind two records matching and continually learning from new customer patterns. This means less manual tuning, fewer errors, and faster adaptation when data evolves.

AI agents help unlock cleaner profiles that other systems can trust. That clarity powers every other agent tasked with decision-making, personalization, or automation across the enterprise. Introducing identity resolution agents marks a turning point: businesses no longer need to choose between speed and precision. They can have the best of both worlds, at scale and in real-time.

Compliant Data is Still an AI Imperative

As generative AI and automated agents become increasingly integrated into customer-facing experiences, compliance is a critical component. Privacy regulations, consent frameworks, and internal governance standards must be embedded directly into the data layer powering these tools. When an AI agent accesses a customer profile, it must apply real-time opt-outs, data use regulations, and brand-specific compliance policies. That means customer consent and data governance must be encoded into every identity and every action.

Failure to do this puts companies at risk of reputational damage, regulatory fines, and customer attrition. A compliant data design creates the conditions for trusted, scalable, and ethical AI deployment when done right. Organizations must invest in systems that can manage data and enforce policy across every use case, especially those involving automation.

Responsible AI Agents Start at the Foundation

Responsible AI starts with how data is collected, cleaned, and made accessible. Without that foundation, any downstream AI tool will operate with limited context and unreliable inputs. IT and data leaders play a pivotal role in this shift. As stewards of the infrastructure and data strategy, they can determine whether AI agents will enhance the business or impact customer trust. They must now prepare data for intelligent use across the enterprise. That means designing for real-time access to customer profiles, enforcing compliance and governance controls, and building scalable ecosystems that integrate seamlessly with the systems where agents operate. This baseline starting point turns AI agents into real operational assets.

Bridging the Gap Between Innovation and Readiness

AI agents powering identity resolution will transform how companies engage customers and make decisions. But without clean, contextualized, and compliant data, they risk adding complexity and confusion instead of optimization and productivity.

The path forward is clear: invest in a modern data foundation that supports fast, accurate identity resolution and real-time enrichment. With the proper groundwork, AI agents can move from promise to performance, confidently driving automation, personalization, and innovation.

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Michael Ramsey, the GVP of Product Management, CRM, and Industry workflows at ServiceNow, explains why it’s more important than ever for companies to double down on their CRM investment. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

CRM software has become a staple of modern business, with roughly 90 percent of mid-sized companies already using some form of CRM system. But the real question is: Does the way these businesses currently use CRM (often focused narrowly on sales tracking or contact management) still meet the evolving, end-to-end needs of customer engagement, service, and success across the entire organization?

Too often, CRM is viewed narrowly as sales force automation (SFA)—a digital Rolodex or pipeline tracker. That view stems from SFA being the first productized segment of CRM, but it no longer fits today’s reality.

CRM now spans marketing, sales, and service, including field service, contact centers, and workforce management. A customer-centric CRM strategy starts with understanding the full customer lifecycle: discovering products (pre-sales), purchasing or renewing (sales), and post-sale interactions like fixing issues, modifying accounts, or disputing bills.

At each of these moments, customers engage with purpose. CRM should capture why they’re reaching out and empower teams to respond with context. This is modern CRM: a unified platform that delivers seamless, high-quality experiences across the entire journey, giving customers exactly what they want.

The Power of a Unified Platform Approach

Behind every successful customer experience is a well-orchestrated internal operation. But for many businesses, customer data lives in silos—marketing systems, support tools, billing platforms, spreadsheets. The result? Incomplete context, misaligned teams, and disjointed service. A unified platform approach connects the dots. It combines systems, data, and processes used by the front, middle, and back office, as well as sales, fulfillment, service, finance, and operations, so that work flows seamlessly.

Consider a national retailer with both e-commerce and physical stores. A customer orders online, then visits the store to ask about the status. If the CRM is connected across systems, the store associate can instantly access the customer’s complete order history, update shipping preferences, and log the interaction for future follow-up.

When systems are disconnected, these moments of truth become friction points. When systems are unified, they become opportunities to build loyalty. Crucially, this doesn’t mean ripping and replacing every legacy tool. A composable architecture lets organizations keep trusted tools, plug in what’s missing, and evolve at their own pace without disruption. That’s the kind of flexibility businesses need and the seamless service customers expect.

 AI-Driven Customer Experiences: Beyond the Hype

The future of CRM is intelligent. With the rise of artificial intelligence, businesses can now turn customer data into insight, and insight into action.

AI doesn’t just help teams work faster. It enables organizations to anticipate customer needs, personalize every interaction, and resolve issues before they escalate. Imagine a utility provider using AI to detect outage patterns in real-time, predict service disruptions, and automatically dispatch support, keeping customers informed without a single phone call.

Even more transformative is the rise of agentic AI. These AI agents don’t just handle simple tasks—they orchestrate entire workflows, from basic to highly complex. They understand context, take action, and collaborate with other agents and human team members to complete sophisticated processes.

For example, a telecom company might deploy AI agents to orchestrate device return workflows. These agents coordinate eligibility checks, shipping logistics, and refund processing while seamlessly handing off approval decisions to human agents when needed. The workflow infrastructure provides unified visibility, allowing teams to track performance across AI and human contributors and optimize KPIs in real-time. This is CRM powered by intelligence—proactive, scalable, and designed for human-AI collaboration.

Breaking Down the Front, Middle, and Back Office Divide

Truly great customer experiences require more than a polished digital customer engagement solution. Customer engagement points can look very different depending on the business. A retailer might rely on mobile apps and in-store staff, while a doctor, bank, or telecom company engages through portals, contact centers, or field service. That’s why an omnichannel CRM approach is critical: it ensures consistent, contextual experiences no matter where or how a customer engages.

Building CRM solutions that connect every function involved in delivering customer expectations, from sales and support to operations and finance, is critical to making that omnichannel approach a reality. A travel company recently integrated its booking, loyalty, and service tools. Now, when a traveler calls about a disruption, the agent can easily see how they’ve interacted with the company digitally to rebook flights, apply loyalty compensation, and follow up automatically. The customer sees one fluid experience, even though multiple departments and touchpoints are involved.

Removing these internal silos isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s a cultural shift. It means rethinking how teams collaborate and how platforms support that collaboration. The payoff is faster resolution, fewer errors, and a more cohesive brand experience.

Today’s customers want options. They might start with a chatbot, continue by phone, and follow up over email, all within the same interaction. A modern CRM must support these journeys without forcing customers to start over at every step. That means maintaining context across channels and ensuring every team member or AI agent can access the whole picture.

For example, a home goods retailer adopted omnichannel CRM tools that carry interaction history from chat to phone to store. As a result, they’ve reduced support times and improved customer satisfaction while lowering operating costs.

This approach isn’t about being everywhere at once. It’s about deeply understanding why customers engage with your brand, whether researching products, making a purchase, requesting service, or looking to renew or expand. A thoughtful CRM strategy organizes your business around those moments, making it easy to surface, capture, and fulfill requests efficiently and carefully. It’s about designing a customer experience that’s proactive, intentional, and always ready to meet them where they are.

A New Era of CRM

More than ever, customers judge companies based on how easy it is to interact with them. A well-orchestrated CRM strategy turns that ease into a competitive edge. This isn’t about checking a box or implementing software for its own sake. It’s about shifting from transactional thinking to relationship thinking—and building the infrastructure to support it.

CRM has the potential to be a strategic engine for delivering the experiences customers want across every phase of their journey. From pre-sales discovery to purchasing, fulfillment, service, and renewals, the goal is to support internal processes and create consistent, valuable experiences that make it easier for customers to get what they need.

Organizations that view CRM with this wider lens aren’t just more efficient; they’re more aligned to their customers’ real needs. They learn faster, adapt faster, and deliver better outcomes at scale. The companies that will lead in the years ahead are those that treat CRM not as a system of record or a departmental tool but as the foundation for orchestrating thoughtful, connected customer experiences.

In a world where expectations are higher and loyalty is harder to earn, doubling down on CRM isn’t just smart, it’s essential.

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Mike Reynolds, a Principal Solutions Architect for Technology Platform Partnerships at Contentful, outlines how front office modernization can help companies deliver a B2C experience for B2B buyers. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

An engaging and easy-to-use website is the hallmark of all digital shopping experiences. Features such as aesthetic designs, easy navigation, and personalization draw in customers, can drive new revenue growth, and cultivate a brand’s image while strengthening loyalty.

Many brands believe that they’ve already captured their B2B audience, but as the commerce environment evolves, investing in current customer experiences is just as important as fostering new relationships. The need for efficiency, reduced costs, and innovation has already led to significant improvements in the back office for many organizations, but now, it’s time to bring the B2B front office up to speed.

Meeting the Needs of Today’s Tech-Savvy (and Selective) Customers

Today’s B2B customers are digital natives. This generation of buyers has grown up around the internet, smartphones, streaming services, and other technology. The same desire for digital convenience they experience as a regular consumer extends to the office and their work. But many businesses still have customers suffering through rigid, outdated systems to complete simple purchasing tasks. These systems force customers to go through tedious manual steps to find what they’re looking for, like navigating through digital versions of print catalogs or waiting on an account representative to answer a simple question, update them on new products, or place an order.

B2B buyers are accustomed to having choices, and they expect brands to be able to deliver what they need at any time, anywhere, and on the channel they prefer. Not to mention, most are already spending a significant amount of time and energy navigating internal procurement processes to make a purchase and don’t have the bandwidth to jump through additional hoops. They need a process that is intuitive and streamlined.

Across industries, technology is rapidly advancing to anticipate and meet these evolving consumer requirements. This puts businesses at a crossroads, where they can either choose to adapt or risk losing customers to other vendors as customer expectations continue to rise.

Advancing the Front Office for Optimized Operations

A modern B2B self-service customer portal puts customers’ needs at their fingertips. Today, an ideal B2B portal gives customers real-time access to their quotes, orders, service tickets, and inventory and offers relevant product suggestions. This creates a more user-friendly experience and helps buyers breeze through purchases faster while providing options to make more informed decisions, ultimately driving long-term loyalty.

Additionally, by synchronizing front-office modernization with enterprise resource planning (ERP) updates, B2B businesses can generate new revenue streams while offsetting transformation costs.

How a Self-Service Experience Creates User Empowerment

Self-service user portals offer a consistent, seamless, and intuitive experience across touchpoints, from initial engagement to purchase and beyond. For B2B sellers, offering this kind of user empowerment increases customer satisfaction and frees up time for teams to focus on other high-value initiatives.

When B2B buyers have instant access to real-time inventory updates, personalized product recommendations, and the ability to initiate and track returns, customer service teams have more time to focus on exceptional consumer interactions. Under these circumstances, teams can strengthen business relationships and improve overall efficiency.

Additionally, utilizing a digital experience platform that offers flexible content management tools makes integrating rich, relevant content into the customer journey seamless. This allows for faster content release cycles, enabling marketing and merchandising teams to invest their primary focus in developing a quality, on-brand experience.

It’s Time to Future Proof

Modernizing the front office isn’t just about keeping pace—it’s about staying ahead. Companies that limit their technological capabilities within their content management systems restrict their ability to grow and remain competitive. Especially in today’s competitive market, moving beyond outdated technology to create smoother commerce experiences can differentiate a brand and strengthen customer relationships.

By prioritizing the B2B buying experiences, businesses will gain crucial competitive advantages over slow adopters through increased customer loyalty and revenue, as well as improved operational efficiency. Those who fail to adapt risk losing customers to other vendors. Future-proofing your business with the right tools is critical to meeting customer expectations, no matter where technology trends go next month or in the years to come.

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