You were right in the middle of your workday when your phone started ringing, snapping you out of your reverie. You don’t recognize the number, but neither does your spam detector, so you pick it up. You’re greeted by an unfamiliar, but cheerfully optimistic voice informing you that you’re eligible for a personal loan from ABCD Bank and that would you possibly be interested. You politely decline and get back to your day, thinking that’s the end of it. But of course, you’re wrong.

The next week, it’s a different number, and a different voice is interrupting your day to tell you the same things. Once again, you express your disinterest, and politely ask them to stop calling and block the number for good measure, but that doesn’t stop a third number from calling you two days later. The fifth time it happens, you lose your cool. You vow to never approach ABCD Bank again, even if you actually need the money.

If you think about it, this experience is pretty bizarre. An interaction meant to win you over ended up ruining your relationship with the business. What’s even more bizarre is how common this is. If it’s not cold calling, it’s sending spammy emails. If it’s not sending spammy emails, it’s bombarding you with ads. Nobody likes it, and yet everyone experiences it.

In an ideal world, CRMs should have put an end to this. CRMs—or Customer Relationship Management systems—help businesses keep track of current and potential customers so they can build great relationships with them. Every interaction you have with a business online tells a CRM a little about you. It could be visiting their website, signing up for a newsletter, commenting on a social media post or even just opening a marketing email. CRMs analyze this data to understand you better, so businesses can offer you a more personalized experience.

Usually, that’s great. It means that you get shopping recommendations for things you actually want and that the sales rep or customer service agent helping you out knows your history with the business. And yet, ABCD bank keeps calling. The promotional emails never stop. And you realize you’re not the valued customer they say you are. You’re an item on their checklist, a data point for them to manipulate so their vanity metrics look better.

Of course, you’re not naive, you know that every business just wants you to buy more. But they don’t just ask you to buy anything these days—everything is perfectly tailored to you, so you believe it’s in your best interest to buy that one more thing. It almost feels like a win-win. And then you realize it isn’t. That you’re just another target in a well-oiled machine designed to keep you buying more more more.

Two years ago, when we started building Frappe CRM, this was something we struggled with. Modern CRMs help businesses sell better, but they often forget what the best relationships are built on: trust. When you deliver a personalized experience to a customer, they feel understood. It manufactures a feeling of closeness. But if they realize that feeling was created just to manipulate them into buying more, they lose trust in the business and your relationship suffers.

There’s also such a thing as too much personalization. CRMs allow businesses to know their customers intimately, and that can sometimes feel like a breach of privacy. We’ve all been on the receiving end of an ad that was timed a little too perfectly to be a coincidence, which makes us wonder, exactly how much do these systems know about us?

And on the other end of the spectrum is automation making our interactions with businesses feel mechanical and transactional. Say that cute new outfit you’d bought started fading after the first wash. When you reach out to the brand, you’re not just looking for a solution, you’re looking for empathy. An automated response, no matter how well-meaning, is bound to make you feel like the business cares more about efficiency than the person on the other end of the line.

Which isn’t to say that automations are bad or that CRMs shouldn’t have them. Somewhere down the line, we plan on adding automations to Frappe CRM as well. The problem isn’t with the technology itself, it’s how it’s used.

To build customer relationships that last, CRMs should be used to augment human interactions, not replace them. You want the business to know that you bought the clothes from them and when you bought them, but you want an actual person to empathize with you and acknowledge your frustration before they offer a solution.

So if you ask us whether CRMs improve customer relationships or not, we’d say: yes, but with a caveat. Businesses should use CRMs to streamline mundane tasks, but the emotionally intelligent aspects of the relationship? Leave that to real people.