Here’s How to Win Holiday Shoppers With Your CRM

This week on Funnel Frontier: Too early for a holiday CRM guide? Tell that to the shoppers who already started, and the AI helping them.

This week:

• Here’s how to win holiday shoppers with your CRM
• Talkdesk just gave Copilot a brain and a badge

Stat of the Week

53% of businesses experience improved customer satisfaction and retention with CRM tools. (CRM.org)

Here’s how to win holiday shoppers with your CRM

The holiday season used to be a one-day doorbuster. Now it’s a months-long gauntlet where every message, every ping, every promo has to earn its place or get swiped away.

The brands that will win in 2025? They are the ones that build connected, customer-first journeys that guide shoppers from “just browsing” to “buy now” without missing a beat.

Recent insights on connected holiday CRM strategies show just how high the stakes have gotten. Here’s what your CRM needs to nail if you want a successful holiday campaign.

🎯 Holiday shopping starts in October. Your strategy should too.

1 in 4 consumers starts their gift hunt before November. Blame Amazon and its Prime Big Deals Day. They pulled the holiday calendar forward, and dragged everyone else with it.

CRM move:

Don’t wait for Black Friday to show up. Map your early-season touchpoints to align with Amazon’s promo calendar, even if you’re not on their platform. Launch high-intent journeys tied to competitor deal days to keep your brand top of mind when the price-hunting begins.

🤖 AI is your new middleman. And it’s influencing the sale.

Adobe Analytics reported that traffic from generative AI sources to U.S. retail websites jumped 1,300% YoY during the 2024 holiday season. Salesforce reported that AI influenced 19% of online orders. And this year? It’s expected that half of U.S. consumers will use GenAI to shop.

CRM move:

Audit how your brand shows up in AI. What do ChatGPT or Google SGE say about you? Start cleaning up your product content and reputation signals. Then mirror that AI experience inside your CRM—chat-style SMS, predictive product recs, natural-language prompts. If AI is the storefront, your CRM should feel like the helpful associate inside.

📩 Make your messages unscrollable.

Your customer’s inbox is a Black Friday sale—with elbows. Hundreds of promos, zero patience. And if your subject line doesn’t earn the click? You’re out before the preview text finishes.

CRM move:

Start with the subject line. Make it pop, tease the value, skip the clichés. Then bring the energy inside the message. Add carousels, swipe galleries, embedded video/audio, or AMP for Email to turn static sends into mini shopping sites. More action in the email = fewer bounces from the email.

🔁 Personalization isn’t just nice—it’s mandatory.

Most shoppers need 5–7 nudges before they hit “buy.” But if your channels don’t talk to each other, every message feels like a cold open—and resets the count.

CRM move:

Use recent behavior, purchases, and browse data to predict what your customers actually want. Then, spotlight it everywhere: email, SMS, push, ads. Identity resolution tools help connect the dots so your customer doesn’t feel like they’re talking to five different brands.

📱 Social isn’t a brand channel anymore. It’s a CRM channel.

In 2024, 1 in 5 digital purchases was influenced by social. And with in-app checkout, comment-to-buy, and AI-fueled DMs, discovery and conversion are happening in the same swipe.

CRM move:

Turn social signals into CRM fuel. Use tools like StatSocial to merge social engagement with your first-party data. If someone clicks through your Instagram carousel but ghosts the cart? Retarget them with emails, push, or ads tailored to that scroll behavior.

And treat DM channels like the new inbox—personalized, persistent, and primed to convert.

Bottom line:

Holiday 2025 isn’t about cranking out promos. It’s about orchestrating a journey.

If your CRM isn’t stitched across social, inbox, SMS, AI, and paid, your “holiday strategy” is just noise in a very crowded sleigh.

The winners? They’re already teeing up January, because smart journeys don’t stop at the checkout.

The Week @ CRM.org

Guide to WordPress CRM Plugins. This is how you turn casual browser pit stop into a lead-generating station. 

CRM vs CMS. It's like asking if you need a butler or a librarian. One handles your customer drama, the other sorts your digital mess.

🌸 Weekly Bloom 🌸 

Short Attention Span + Mindfulness = Success at Work? Our brains have something called “plasticity.” Turns out that’s useful in our contemporary cognitive jumble.

Talkdesk just gave Copilot a brain and a badge

Contact centers are chaotic. Customers don’t follow scripts. Systems don’t talk to each other. Agents spend more time navigating tools than solving problems.

Talkdesk’s new Copilot upgrade? It’s a full-blown partner in the trenches.

Agentic AI meets the human frontline

Forget clunky bots and canned responses. This Copilot runs with agentic AI, meaning it understands nuance, context, and what the agent actually needs, not just what was asked.

It can:

• Understand layered questions across multiple systems
• Pull live data from your tech stack
• Trigger workflows mid-call
• Recommend actions in real time
• Keep the agent in control the whole way through

The agent’s still steering. Copilot’s just handing them the map, the GPS, and a co-driver with six monitors.

Unified brains: now with Databricks

To fuel this next-level brainpower, Talkdesk deepened its integration with Databricks, aka the data lakehouse of choice for enterprise AI stacks.

With zero-copy integration, Copilot gets full access to customer histories, purchase behavior, support tickets, and whatever else your teams have been hoarding in siloed CRMs.

That means no swivel-chairing between tools. The AI already knows.

Trust? Built-in.

Talkdesk is smart to get ahead of the next AI backlash: the new Copilot offers transparent audit trails, decision logs, and governance controls so businesses can track what AI said, did, or recommended—and why.

Because when you’re handling sensitive customer data (and regulators are circling), “the bot told me to” won’t cut it.

So what’s the CRM takeaway?

Talkdesk is wiring up copilots that think, act, and rally behind your agents like it’s game day. Here’s what that means: 

• Human agents aren’t going away. But they need copilots who actually help, not just recap knowledge base articles.
• Your best agent isn’t the one who knows the script. It’s the one who knows when to rewrite it. Copilot gives them real-time intel, recommended actions, and the power to fix things fast.
• Context is the new currency. If your CRM, support stack, and product info don’t speak the same language, your AI might sound confident, but it’s bluffing. And bluffing doesn’t scale.
• Real-time guidance > post-call analytics. The best moment to fix an issue is while it’s happening—not in next month’s report.

Because in 2025, “helpful AI” is table stakes. You need AI that chases down resolutions, reads the room, and hits the handoff without fumbling.

If your CRM stack can’t keep up, it’s ghosting your customers without you even knowing it.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

Afiniti and Five9 Partner to Power AI-Based Call Routing. Five9 is integrating Afiniti’s behavioral pairing tech to match callers with agents based on real-time personality data. The goal: boost CX outcomes like sales and satisfaction through smarter, AI-driven routing. 

WestCX Launches Agentic AI Platform for Pharmacies. WestCX rolled out an AI platform that helps pharmacies handle refills, prior auths, and patient follow-ups with minimal staff input. It’s designed to cut admin time and improve service across phone, SMS, and chat.

Microsoft Adds New AI Agents to Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Microsoft expanded its contact center suite with AI agents that summarize calls, manage cases, and write knowledge articles. The agents work across voice and digital channels.

If you'd like weekly CRM news like this delivered to your inbox, subscribe to Funnel Frontier!