(5 minute read)

The past few years have seen rapid evolution of traditional databases into CRM systems, Enterprise Resource Planning, Social and Mobile CRM and increasingly Cloud. In this blog post, I chart some evolving trends in the current and future landscape.

Modern CRM is often delivered as Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) and micro-services in modular form. There are two models of operations behind CRM:

  • Operational – CRM helps in performing functional roles, automating tasks to build relationships with customers.
  • Analytical – CRM helps in mining data about those relationships to help determine where to allocate resources to receive best ROI, determine customer acquisition costs, and follow leads.

Emerging trends will affect all areas of business.

  • Organisational Perspective
  • Moving from niche to mainstream leading to more understanding, easier and more widespread uptake
  • Moving away from traditional product and service oriented focus towards consumer driven cycle
  • Supporting different business models and organisational sizes
  • Disappearing distinctions between B2B and B2C
  • Operational Perspective
  • Empowers customer facing staff with the right data about their customers at the right time with the right context so that they can focus on nurturing relationships across journeys, channels, and devices
  • Dramatically reduces customer response times, providing for more responsive services
  • Prioritises customer service
  • Intensifies competition to face customer demand
  • More use of AI for better customer service integration
  • Technical / Infrastructural Perspective
  • Componentises: uses systems to solve a problem, modernise existing applications, or serve business transformation
    • At operational level vendors will offer more fragmented, modular applications
    • More APIs for easy access to enterprise applications
    • Enables deep customisation and integration
  • Verticalises for agility:
    • Better common process flows, data model extensions, UI labels
  • Strategic / Analytical Perspective
  • Platforms will become more strategic, unifying data, processes, and security within various deployments
  • Will enable developers or analysts to use low-code or no-code tooling to create applications for extended capabilities within packaged CRM
  • CRM Ecosystems will deliver value
  • Application Exchanges will consist of an ecosystem of point solutions that extend and enhance core CRM capabilities
  • Data mining technology will be a big leap forward; use of AI will move more from operational to analytical
  • Cloud CRM will remain dominant, fed by mobile CRM primarily from developing markets

Social and Mobile CRM

Is used to

  • Help build stronger customer relationships
  • Help design more customer friendly environments that feel rewarding, which in turn facilitates more customer engagement, data sharing, and capturing more customer data
  • Facilitate customer engagement directly on social media to enhance reputation management
  • Strengthen social media as a platform for direct sales
  • Strengthen focus on influencer marketing for sentiment analysis
  • Expand use of social media and mobile to target leads
  • Prioritise messaging apps
  • Huge growth in mobile focused CRM (mCRM) and mobile email marketing
  • Messaging apps will be the new frontier – users on messengers surpass social network user numbers
  • New push notifications from iOS and Android which will launch as soon as users open an app; useful for re-engaging
  • Behaviour based segmentation is key for campaigns; customers will be personalised based on loyalty, activity, hibernation, risk
  • Integrating with web push

Continue to explore other posts related to Cloud and Analytics in order to expand your understanding.