CURRENT AND FUTURE CRM TRENDS
These days, having the best products and services simply isn’t enough to ensure business profitability. Building relationships with customers to foster loyalty and retention, for instance, can significantly influence your bottom line. Customer relationship management remains a huge part of the game, and staying ahead of CRM trends can help give your business an edge over the competition. So first, lets talk about current trends.
CRM Goes Mainstream
The CRM industry is truly evolving beyond its reach and 2018 showed how the mainstream industry has caught on with it. More and more companies these days look for a Customer Relationship Management platform early on in their existence.
The multitude of benefits in terms of customer acquisition, retention, and management are hallmarks that make CRM a must-have software. SugarCRM and Salesforce still hold the top spots when it comes to the best but expect more CRM vendors to sprout in 2019, offering basic or mid-scale services at cheaper rates to target the SMEs.
However, a word of caution; the rise of GDPR and privacy regulations regarding big data is serious stuff, so opt for a CRM vendor that guarantees data privacy.
Artificial Intelligence and Marketing Automation
2018 paved the way, 2019 will cement their footing! Artificial Intelligence is truly here and the amazing benefits it presents for companies worldwide means it’s not going away any time soon.
Artificial Intelligence with CRM makes for an interesting combination that brings order and proactiveness to customer support and management. Expect companies to leverage AI in areas beyond customer support in 2019 to achieve a competitive edge. Voice-to-text functionalities, spam filters, sales forecasting, smart searches, and sentimental analysis are all areas that can do a lot more with Artificial Intelligence.
Mobile CRM
Mobile CRM provides its users the core CRM functionalities on the go and brings a whole new range of possibilities for your CRM users. 2018 saw Mobile CRM breakthrough for Sales departments. With CRM functionalities on their phone, Sales teams improved their productivity by closing deals and managing clients on the go.
By being constantly connected to the CRM, your salespeople are always a touch away from your clients. Certain CRM integrations can add to the diverse functionality of Mobile CRM and improved data quality. Mobile CRM ensured new data into the database in real time and increased CRM adoption rates with its multi-device adaptability.
After we talked about current trends we can talk about future trends — or at least make a guess.
The Age of Customer Experience
Business revolves around the customer today more than ever. So it’s no surprise customer experience is predicted to become the top brand differentiator by 2020. Consumers agree, according to a 2019 Salesforce survey. In it, 84% of respondents ranked the importance of experience at the same level as products or services.
The Role of AI
AI is not only here, it’s on the path to major growth, according to Salesforce research. Respondents to the 2019 State of Marketing report indicated that their AI use cases would go up 257% over the next two years.
Mobile CRM Isn’t Going Away
Mobility has long been a central component of sales activities. An Aberdeen Group study from back in 2012 was already highlighting the importance of extending CRM systems beyond the confines of the office.
CRM Will Continue to Get Social
As the customer experience bar raises to new heights, social media has become a focal point.
CRM Software Will Become More User-Friendly
David Dozer, CTO of Blaze IT LLC, believes the coming few years will bring about a“renaissance of simplicity, where the focus shifts back to making things easy and simple to use.”
We can see that current and future trends are quite similar. In other words there is no revolucionary trends in future, current trends will only improve in future….
