The Human Side of CRM: Building Care into Systems

I recently went through an experience that made me reflect on how systems can either support or undermine an organisation’s engagement with its customers. While abroad, my wife suffered a medical emergency. Our travel insurance company stepped in to arrange our return home, but the way it was handled created enormous stress. Her doctors had advised that she travelled slowly, with long stopovers to manage her condition. The insurance company overrode this advice, insisting that their own ‘medical team’ had ruled otherwise. We never spoke to this team, nor saw a written opinion, only instructions relayed by anonymous staff managing her case.

It left me wondering: were these decisions really about medical care, or about operational convenience?

Insurance companies’ engagement with their members can be understood across three layers. The first is the policy, which defines the non-negotiable boundaries of coverage. The second is the processes, the internal systems designed to handle cases efficiently but that ideally should allow flexibility to adapt to individual circumstances. The third is the human interaction, which shapes how people are treated in moments of stress and vulnerability.

These are complex operations that must be available around the clock, with staff working in shifts and cases often passed between different people. As a result, there is rarely a single point of contact for the member, and without empathy and care in how rules are communicated and applied, already difficult situations can quickly become fragmented and impersonal. The risk is that the human dimension becomes overshadowed by systems, and the harm caused can outweigh the value of strict compliance.

What we needed in our case was transparency, a direct line to the actual medical decision-makers, and a sense that someone was personally accountable. Instead, our voices, as well as our doctors’ voices, were lost inside a black-box system, most likely mediated through a CRM.

This struck me hard because, in my professional life, I have been responsible for implementing a company-wide CRM system. I know how powerful these tools can be, when used well. By design, a CRM will always translate people into data points. The question is how that data is used. It can reduce conversations to template-driven transactions and strip away empathy, or it can enrich human interaction by giving staff the context, history, and insight they need to respond with care. When data is used merely for compliance and efficiency, trust erodes. But when it is used to strengthen relationships, it becomes the foundation for building community and sustaining loyalty.

That’s why I want to share my reflections on how CRMs can be transformed into tools for care: helping align policies, processes, and human interactions so that systems support organisations to serve better.

Reframing CRM: From Pipeline to People

The dominant paradigm of CRM implementation originates in the world of sales and marketing, where systems were designed to support measurable business outcomes. Earlier best practices framed CRMs as tools to streamline customer acquisition and retention: capturing leads, moving them through funnels, tracking conversion rates, and segmenting markets for targeted campaigns. In this model, the CRM was essentially an efficiency machine. It existed to reduce friction in the pipeline, ensure no opportunity was lost, and quantify success through metrics like deal closure, upsell rates, and customer lifetime value.

Historically, the earliest CRMs were little more than digitised Rolodexes or contact databases in the 1980s and 1990s. They were designed to help salespeople remember who they had called and what was promised. By the late 1990s, with the rise of the early Salesforce cloud offering, CRMs became enterprise-scale platforms focused on pipeline visibility, sales forecasting, and marketing automation. These systems promised managerial control and efficiency, but their architecture was built around transactions and pipelines, not relationships and trust. 

That lineage still shapes the logic of most implementations today. A CRM is still most often judged by how well it manages the flow of opportunities, automates processes, and produces reports for managers. Useful, certainly, for keeping sales teams coordinated and for demonstrating measurable marketing success. But this origin created a blind spot: the systems were never meant to capture the subtler dimensions of human relationships with an organisation. In practice, this can mean that efficiency is prized over care: for example, an insurance company may streamline its processes to minimise payouts rather than to support policyholders in vulnerable moments, treating people as costs to be contained rather than as lives to be cared for.

The result is a flattening of human experience into categories that the system can measure. A policyholder becomes a claim to be processed. A donor becomes a line item in a fundraising target. A patient becomes a billing record. A student becomes a recruitment statistic. A community member becomes an account to be progressed along a pipeline, reduced to movement between stages rather than the substance of the relationship. In each case, the system privileges the institution’s need to measure and manage over the individual’s need to be understood and remembered. It reflects what the technology was built to optimise, and in doing so it has reshaped the relationship between individuals and organisations, reducing whole experiences of trust, care, and recognition into impersonal transactions that feel diminished.

Even in their most advanced form, contemporary platforms like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics inherit this sales oriented DNA. Their design centres on workflows, pipelines, and dashboards, with “customer-centric” features typically layered on top of these core functions. They are powerful products, and nothing in them prevents more human-centred use. The limitation lies less in the software itself than in the mindset of implementation. If an organisation configures its CRM only to track revenue or service tickets, that is the kind of value it will generate. But, if it configures the same system to capture relational context — who trusts whom, who influences others, what commitments have been made, what values underpin the relationship — it becomes something different: not a database of transactions, but a living archive of trust and social capital.

This reframing positions the CRM not as a ledger of transactions but as a tool of stewardship, where credibility, reliability, and care serve as the foundations of lasting influence. When used well, a CRM makes these qualities visible at scale, ensuring that interactions reflect not only efficiency but also the values and commitments that sustain genuine relationships.

From Records to Relationships: The Ethics of Relational CRM

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, philosopher Hannah Arendt warned of the dangers of reducing people to faceless members of a system, stripped of their individuality. For her, human dignity depended on the recognition of each individual as capable of self-determination, of beginning anew, and of belonging to a community. When this recognition is denied, they lose the “right to have rights”. Arendt showed how once individuals are no longer recognised as persons with inherent dignity, they can be managed, discarded, or destroyed by institutions without moral restraint.

In Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block argues that genuine belonging does not emerge through institutional strategies, marketing, or treating people as abstract “audiences.” It arises instead through authentic connections: dialogue, listening, and relational trust at the level of individuals and small groups. Block frequently contrasts the limits of business-centric thinking with the transformative power of small, relational acts, writing that “the small group is the unit of transformation” (ch. 9) and that “community is fundamentally created through conversations that build relatedness and a sense of belonging” (Part 1). He underscores that while organisations may provide support, real community is created by engaged people themselves, not by systems or campaigns.

Together, Arendt and Block highlight the ethical stakes in how organisations design and use CRMs. When misused, organisations erode recognition, belonging, and dignity by turning CRMs into instruments of surveillance and control. People are flattened into datapoints or “accounts,” treated as contacts to be moved along a pipeline, analysed, segmented, and optimised. Yet the same tool can serve a very different purpose. At their best, CRMs become instruments of recognition: preserving stories, capturing context and feedback, and shaping engagement with empathy. A human-centered approach insists that behind every record is not an abstraction but a person capable of trust, contribution, and community.

A good CRM is a living archive. Without it, institutional memory is fragile: when staff leave, relationships vanish and context dissolves. With it, continuity is preserved and social capital is cultivated—the awareness of who trusts you and why, who influences others and how, who builds bridges and where. This is not about hoarding data but about stewarding relationships in ways that build resilience and sustain community over time.

Stewardship, however, has boundaries. A relational ethic requires transparency about how information is used, respect for privacy, consent that it serves the person as well as the institution, and safeguards against manipulation or exploitation. Put simply, a CRM should be used with people, not on people.

In encouraging CRM adoption inside organisations, it is tempting to measure success by what is easiest to count: the number of contacts uploaded, the volume of emails sent, the clicks tracked, or the “touchpoints” logged. I have fallen into this myself, emphasising these metrics in the hope of incentivising use. Much effort also went into profiling preferences and segmenting people into neat categories, as if quantity and categorisation could substitute for quality. Yet, this approach risks reinforcing the very flattening the CRM was meant to overcome. A more humanised implementation requires different measures of success: whether the system helps staff remember stories, capture context, and engage with empathy; whether it strengthens trust, preserves continuity, and supports community. In this light, the purpose of a CRM is not to prove activity but to enable more meaningful relationships. Activity may be a prerequisite, but it is never the condition for success.

It is worth stressing that this approach is entirely possible. The barrier is not technical, nor is it a question of software features. It depends on how the system is implemented, the culture of the organisation that uses it, and the choices made in everyday practice. In this sense, CRMs sit within the layer of business processes: they should provide structure and continuity, yet remain flexible enough never to overshadow the human element. Policies may set the boundaries, but it is processes that can either flatten or enhance human interaction. When designed well, they support authentic connection rather than substitute for it. I have lived through this experience, and while it is hard work, it is also proof that a more humanised approach is possible. A CRM used in this way reflects less the technology itself and more the values of the institution behind it.

Conclusion: Rehumanizing the System

The deeper question at the heart of this post is what happens when organisations choose to structure themselves around people rather than processes. Such an organisation is sustained by legitimacy, care, and resilience, and not by efficiency alone.

A CRM, like any system, mirrors the philosophy behind it. Implemented with the aim of extraction, it corrodes trust. Configured to respect and remember, it cultivates loyalty and community. The difference lies less in the software than in the intent.

The real challenge, then, is not only to audit a CRM by usage metrics or record counts, but also by the depth of the relationships it sustains. This has been a hard lesson for me. Scale and numbers matter, but quality must remain the ultimate goal. Ask not how many names are stored, but how many commitments are honoured, how many voices are remembered, and how many bridges are strengthened. These intangible dimensions are difficult to capture in a system, but they can be.

A CRM can therefore become more than a tool. It can enable a relationship practice, shaped by four dimensions:

• Knowledge stewardship — safeguarding what you have learned about people.
• Empathy at scale — recognising patterns of need and sentiment.
• Institutional memory — remembering who built what, when, and why.
• Distributed trust — affirming the stewards of community across networks.

To rehumanize our systems is not to reject efficiency, but to place efficiency in service of empathy, trust, and care. Not just pipelines, but people.

Because in the end, no market thrives without trust, and trust cannot endure when people are flattened into cases to process instead of experiences deserving dignity and respect.

P.S.

I know many staff feel uncomfortable being named or fully transparent with clients. Often this is a way of protecting themselves from the frustration, hostility, or even abuse that sometimes comes their way. Clients do mistreat staff and, at times, try to take advantage of companies. But this cycle cannot be broken by clients; it has to begin within organisations. How a company chooses to treat its clients sets the tone for how clients respond in return. In the long run, it is always more expensive, more time-consuming, and more difficult to manage frustrated clients than to nurture satisfied ones.