The economic implications of Covid-19 have been devastating for many sectors and individuals. As we head into the summer of 2021 anticipating that most places in the U.S. will be fully open for business, many industries are looking at what the post-Covid recovery will mean for them. For sales professionals, the comeback might certainly bring a windfall but also presents challenges.

A lot of time and treasure has already been spent on "going digital" with no clear understanding of what that should mean. But going digital should, at least in part, mean taking full responsibility for turning a business' mountain of customer data into usable information that advances the company mission.

Important as it is to continually acquire new customers, it's every bit as vital for businesses to nurture existing clientele. The E-Commerce Times talked with several experts in customer engagement to get their thoughts about why it's critical to cultivate current customers -- and how to encourage them to stick around.

The big questions about reopening the global economy and what new moves portend are coming in for analysis. It's not yet clear what the new normal is -- and there are more than a few straws in the wind that suggest that fixing one problem might cause another. This entire discussion before us isn't really about the new normal. Instead, it's about trying to ask the right questions that will get us there.

I've been writing about the importance of platform as a tool and as a strategy for a while -- and not only with regard to Salesforce. I'd say most CRM vendors have a platform story; others like Oracle and Zoho come up as examples all the time. The difference with Salesforce is that it's looking beyond the platform to what it does, not only for its customers but also for the company's own positioning.

TrovaPage helps creators and other entrepreneurs focus on marketing without detracting from their creativity. The internet marketplace provides a complete e-commerce platform that allows entrepreneurs to build, market, and bill for services. Users' businesses range from yoga instruction and guitar lessons, to small restaurants, personalized astrology, and nonprofits.

Customer churn is costing mid-market companies an average of $5.5 million per year. Retailers need to avoid the expensive mistakes that result in such disastrous churn. This presents a clamorous alarm to marketers. One solution to this costly predicament is to get sales teams to work effectively, and consistently, in CRM platforms.

Many digital marketers spend too much on targeting an already loyal customer base rather than tapping into new streams. Dr. Jorge Barraza, professor of applied psychology at the University of Southern California, has a plan to help advertisers reach consumers that would not normally buy their products, by using the principle of contextual alignment.

Newsletters have become popular over the last few years; and especially over the past year during you-know-what when in-person meetings were taboo. Many companies are trying to figure out how to best leverage them, and new software platforms make it increasingly easy to produce one or more. What interests me about the newsletter format is how blog-like it is.

Certainly, the pandemic has caused some upheavals in American business -- and it's true that the record of progress in economics is littered with creative destruction. But the absolutist prognostications about the future of digital commerce taking over the world made me think "here we go again." Trees don't grow to the moon, retrenchment is common.

Even the most customer-centric businesses can overestimate their performance or miss the broad trends in customer behavior. That is why NICE inContact conducts annual surveys that track the customer experience from the perspective of businesses and consumers. CRM Buyer discussed the recent findings and related issues in more detail with the company's CEO Paul Jarman.

Engaging in disaster recovery requires a company to think about many things, but despite the long checklists that are created to accomplish DR, there are some areas that frequently get overlooked in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. With this in mind, it is imperative to address all areas of concern before a disaster strikes, not during or after the event.

As we slowly climb out of the Covid anis horribilis, advocates of the new normal (whatever that is) may wish to temper their prognostications about working from home or working from anywhere. While those are good ideas, and the new crop of CRM apps that support such hybrid work lives are genuinely cool, they might only demonstrate the deep functionality of CRM companies' platforms and not a social movement.

Personalization and automation, two of the hottest buzzwords in the lexicon of CRM practitioners, are all the rage for marketers these days. But only 14 percent of organizations are using artificial intelligence or machine language to automate their marketing campaigns. A survey by Rackspace Technology reveals that the majority of organizations worldwide lack the internal resources to support these high-powered CRM initiatives.

When it comes to marketing strategies, nothing is more important than analyzing and measuring the actual effectiveness, influence, and ROI of every campaign. Understanding the contribution of every channel and the customer conversion process enables marketers to adapt and adjust accordingly. Let's discuss what marketing attribution is; and how it can help e-commerce companies grow their businesses.

In the old days you could identify weak spots in your business and purchase software systems designed to eliminate or at least to significantly reduce those liabilities. Performing an ROI analysis usually consisted of two parts: a before study to determine the business' steady state; and a post implementation analysis to determine improvement. Good as that sounds, such studies left out a lot.

As the CRM solution set continues to grow, it's likely that training systems will be increasingly important. That growth has the effect of converging vendor functionality at roughly the same place, making tertiary product attributes like training systems important differentiators. Taking this into account, the next big thing in CRM might not be a new customer-facing app -- but one that faces employees.

Monitoring and maintaining your data is an ongoing, strategic process. By educating your CRM users -- and making their data entry process as easy as possible -- you can ensure that better-quality data will be entering the system. Here's how you can give your company a true advantage -- and empower everyone who relies on your CRM's data.

One of the big marketing decisions confronting e-commerce vendors today is whether current performance is good enough. Online vendors need to consider their customers' shopping experience in order to assess existing barriers to stronger shopper responsiveness to digital storefronts. For retailers who drop the ball with errors such as inaccurate product feeds and promised products that never arrive, it's redo time.

Shopping trends are expanding as the pandemic's effect on e-commerce continues, forcing retailers to adapt their marketing strategies to meet new consumer expectations and demands, according to a new report. Consumer adoption of digital shopping is driving increased use of user-generated content, new private labels, and access to product sampling.

Commerce analysts do not see consumers shedding their newfound buying options in the wake of a post-pandemic marketplace. Concerns for health safety, social distancing, and remote working will remain priorities for many shoppers. Merchants who demonstrate that they are able to quickly get products to consumers, resolve issues with customer service, and provide fast delivery and returns will be the ones that thrive.

Oracle's continued strides in the tech space say a lot about perseverance and deep pockets. It was a darling of the 20th century tech era, rising from a startup in the database wars and becoming the sole surviving independent database company. But at some point, success leveled out its rise and it became just another big company. Then came the challenge of cloud computing.

If you step back and look at what the tech sector has demonstrated to us through COVID, you can feel impressed. Early in the crisis vendors like Salesforce and Zoho began offering their products for free, or at low cost, to companies and end users suddenly faced with working at home. Oracle, Salesforce and others also developed tracking apps that could be easily deployed on the Web to help health authorities track exposure and quarantines.

Oracle learned a lot from its customers and plowed its findings back into its core product just as others were getting restless and seeking alternatives. Oracle is now calling its product a "converged database" to help with differentiation by highlighting that many businesses don't often only focus on OLTP or AI, but that their businesses require a bit of everything.

This might be a big year for CRM. I say might because I am not clairvoyant, and humility is on the resolutions list. CRM has gone through five 5-year cycles during the past few decades. That trend feels as old as SaaS at this point, and I think we're going to embark on a new cycle that will take roughly five years to reach fulfillment. The big question now is: "What will it be?"

E-commerce is now at an all-time high, with global sales figures projected to reach $4.1 trillion in 2020, almost doubling since 2015. While the spectrum of global customers has broadened, so has the scope of competition. As the need for customer support grows, there is a golden opportunity for brands to capitalize on the changes fueled by the pandemic and emerge from the crisis with a newfound customer base.

The idea that CRM products should be priced according to the utility they deliver sounds good, but it raises a lot of questions too. With value pricing, you might expect the cost of CRM to rise and fall as a business gets more or less use and value from its investment, but who gets to determine the value received and, while we're at it, what is the right measure of value?

The front office is moving out the front door and into the world. Actually, it's exiting via the Internet, the windows and side doors, to form the basis of what will be the 'next normal' or whatever future historians want to call it. For a while, when we were just dabbling with mobility and social media, we could ignore all that -- but no more.

Back in Q1 Salesforce threw out its annual plan and did a pretty good imitation of a startup or a jazz band. They developed products like Work.com and Salesforce Anywhere as solutions to the evolving need for systems that would help their customers cope with the pandemic. The products supported both working remotely and safeguarding the premises when people returned.

It is often said that only a poor workman blames his tools and only an inferior vendor blames the customer for their troubles with a product. But too many user organizations just don't seem to be adopting CRM to the degree that it takes to be successful -- even after more than two decades of trying.