#Ep115 What you need to know about CRM, with Grazi Sbardelotto

No episode 115 from AmplificaCast, Eric Klein receives Grazi Sbardelotto, VP and Partner of PM Web...for a conversation that gets straight to the point about what separates a company that has data from a company that knows how to use data to understand and monitor... customer journey Truly. From the very first minutes, it becomes clear that the issue isn't platform, it isn't tool, it isn't technology. It's about how a company decides to relate to those who buy from it, and what's at stake in that choice throughout each stage of the customer journey.

Grazi's career began before the topic became fashionable. At 19, she structured a CRM department at her family's Fiat dealership, at a time when the subject barely existed in university curricula. There were no professors to guide her, no clear market reference. There was a real problem: customers who went to the dealership, were well or poorly served, bought or didn't buy, and then disappeared. Nobody knew what happened next. Nobody followed the customer journey after the first interaction.

What Grazi created at the time, with what she herself calls a "customer follow-up department," was exactly that: a process to understand what happened after the customer left the store, whether they had any questions, whether they wanted to speak to the same salesperson again, whether they were ready to buy. Simple. But enough to bring in more sales.

One of Grazi's first and most important contributions in the episode is to dispel a very common misconception: that implementing CRM begins with choosing the platform. It doesn't. The customer journey needs to be mapped out beforehand. What does the company want to do with the information it already has? What is the customer's behavior at each stage? Where are the communication gaps? Where does the company lose the thread of the conversation?

Only after these questions are answered does the choice of tool make sense. PM Web has chosen to be platform-agnostic precisely for this reason. The company works with Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Insider, Braze, Zoho, and others, depending on what the client already has and what makes sense for their business objectives. Often, especially in multinational companies, the decision about which platform to use is made outside of Brazil. It's not up to PM Web to question this choice. Its role is to extract the maximum benefit from it. And this positioning is only possible because the focus is on the customer journey, not the tool.

One of the strongest arguments in the episode is the distinction between accumulating information and transforming information into action. Grazi is direct: any retailer, any airline, any pharmacy chain already has data on who bought, through which channel, in which store, and how often. The volume of data is not the problem. The problem is how this data is interpreted and how it is translated into relevant communication throughout the customer journey.

When a company views the customer as someone who needs to buy at any cost, it uses data reactively, pushing offers at the wrong time. When it understands that the same customer can buy many more times, the logic changes completely. The customer journey begins to be read in depth. Data is not just for conversion. It serves to anticipate, to create relevance, to build a relationship that goes beyond the transaction.

The example of pharmacies illustrates this precisely. When the trend of slimming pens gained traction in the market, the team noticed that those who bought the product tended to buy more vitamins afterward. This insight didn't appear by chance. It emerged from understanding customer behavior over time, the customer journey within the pharmacy. And this behavior was transformed into a relevant campaign, not a generic promotion sent to the entire customer base.

The customer lifecycle is one of the most practical topics in the episode. It's also the link between the customer journey and CRM segmentation. Grazi shows that, in the pharmaceutical retail sector, this is taken to another level. The pharmacy tracks the customer's life in a way that few other segments can. It knows what's in continuous use, knows when to restock, and understands how a particular medication impacts the consumption of other products.

A pregnant woman enters a specific journey. A customer who starts using continuous medication enters another. A customer who bought the slimming pen is on yet another. Each of these situations represents a different moment in the customer journey and requires different communication, a different offer, and different timing. CRM that doesn't respect this rhythm tends to be intrusive, generic, and ineffective.

This same reasoning applies to the automotive sector, fashion retail, and companies. B2B with longer purchase cycles. The logic is the same: use behavior to map where each person is in the customer journey and build communication that makes sense at that specific moment.

In this episode, Grazi paints a clear picture of how the platform market has changed. In the past, there was a more defined competition between a few players. Today, a large company's marketing stack is rarely composed of just one tool. One is stronger for CDP. Another for activation. Another was chosen for customer service. And they all need to work in an integrated way so that the customer journey doesn't become fragmented along the way.

This fragmentation creates a real challenge. It's not just technical; it's strategic. When data is in one place, activation in another, and customer service in yet another, it's very easy for the customer journey to have gaps. Communication loses coherence. The customer receives messages that don't make sense in relation to their past experience. And the experience deteriorates precisely where it should be strengthened.

PM Web's agnostic stance solves part of this problem. Those not committed to a specific platform can look at the client's stack without bias and identify the gaps that are compromising the continuity of the customer journey.

The conversation about artificial intelligence in this episode is one of the most honest that AmplificaCast has ever featured. Grazi doesn't talk about an abstract future. She talks about ongoing projects, with real-world examples.

One of the cases she mentions involves a client who operates virtually the entire CRM workflow via prompts, without writing a single line of code. Another example is the use of social listening agents within WPP Open, which collect what a brand's consumers are saying on social media and translate that data into input for CRM campaigns. Result: a 30 to 40% gain in process agility, with the potential to reach 60 to 70%.

But the most honest point of the episode about AI is the warning about token cost. The more agents running simultaneously, the more processing power is consumed, and the value rises significantly. In an internal experiment, the team saw the cost skyrocket when multiple agents worked in parallel. This changes the equation of the automated customer journey. It's not enough to know which agents to activate. You need to know when and with what intensity, because each interaction has a real cost.

When the episode touches on the topic of the job market, Grazi is straightforward. The roles that will disappear are those that are limited to performing repetitive tasks without an analytical layer. The professional who will remain relevant in managing the customer journey is the one who uses AI to expand their delivery capacity, who sees problems as opportunities, and who knows how to collaborate with agents in the same way they collaborate with people.

She also warns about the risk of delegating too much to machines: “If we always assume, ‘I’m going to use AI, I’m going to respond with AI, I’m not going to think about it,’ forget it. Everyone will become dumber.” This statement summarizes what many professionals working with customer journey management need to hear. Human curation remains essential. AI accelerates. Critical thinking anchors.

Throughout the episode, Grazi talks about how PM Web manages its own client portfolio with the same logic that guides the projects it delivers. Everyone involved in an account needs to signal weekly whether the client is sensitive or stable. If there is a risk, the entire company is informed: what the problem is, who is involved, what the plan is. "This is a process that I think can't possibly be anything but manual, in a way, because it's truly about sensitivity."

This statement is one of the richest points of the episode. Because it shows that, no matter how much technology is available, understanding the human moment within the customer journey still depends on perception, context, and attention. CRM doesn't solve this on its own. It's the process behind the tool that ensures the signal is captured before it becomes a problem.

Watch the episode 115 from AmplificaCast with Grazi SbardelottoJoin us, VP and Partner at PM Web, for a conversation that ranges from a Fiat dealership in the 2000s to AI agents running in real time. If you work in CRM, marketing, or customer management and want to move away from simply accumulating data and towards using data to build a results-driven customer journey, this episode delivers exactly that.

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