Spotify’s VP of Growth: CRM is much more than off-the-shelf software

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“The customer is always under warranty,” Spotify VP of Growth Mayur Gupta told me.

Of course, he was speaking figuratively to emphasize his view that modern brands need to continually pay attention to their customers.

In other words, he said, businesses’ need to re-evaluate what is meant by “customer relationship management.”

CRM — which falls under his purview at Spotify — “for me is not [just] the ability to send emails,” he said. Rather, he added, it’s understanding user or customer behavior in real time or just in time, so the brand can shoot you a message appropriate to a dormant or casual or core user.

“That’s where a traditional CRM isn’t sophisticated enough to map these signals for the journey,” he said. “CRM has been around for a while, but it’s so, so far away from where it needs to be.”

“Of course, they can manage a shopping cart abandonment and send me an email, [but] I’m talking about much more complicated behaviors that are not just rules,” like managing responses to behaviors across multiple channels. Artificial intelligence enhancements are often employed these days to move marketing platforms past rules-based responses.

“The expectations that the user has are much higher” than they used to be, Gupta pointed out.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]


About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.


 

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