Business and the ways business is done is evolving at a lightning pace. While a lot is been speculated in the domain of IoT and Artificial Intelligence but CRM will continue to evolve and play a significant and imperative role in the domain of business. The coming year promises new opportunities as well as new competitive threats so you need to be armored to face it in the best possible way.
As competition rises, meeting these demands needs a rock solid customer experience at each and every touch point. Thereby this constant customer relationship management will give an increased scope to artificial intelligence, big data, automation and of course analytics.
CRM definitely has to step up its game!
Businesses are evolving and so are the CRM systems, they are gradually morphing from just being a mere record of customer interaction to a broader spectrum of customer experience. Customer Experience which is now popularized by the term CX. CX has become imperative these days as it ensures that you deliver top-notch experiences to your customers which are not only immediate but connected and personalized.
CRM will for sure embrace CX this coming year. So let’s see a few innovations that are expected to create a little stir in the CRM in the upcoming year.
1. Stronger and Deeper Intelligence
As discussed earlier understanding customer needs and managing them and giving them a splendid customer experience at every single touch point will involve a lot more and complete data. CRM systems are constantly evolving in this direction and aid in bringing together more contact data and making it more meaningful, prompt and actionable through improved dashboarding. The first iteration of this will result in a highly classified AI based system for drawing valuable insights from customer needs and figure out the appropriate experience for them. 2018 will witness a lot of more visual representation of data and more of automated analysis. CRM systems will try to put forward greater personalization options such as creating dynamic landing pages that are done around customer data. Hence CRM will continue its march towards personalization.
2. Automated Workflow Establishment
In the coming year manual labor will be considered as an obstacle and it will be avoided as much as possible as it goes in the opposite direction of the dynamic business. So this year we will see CRM systems will start adjusting workflows and try and automate them for increased efficiency. Taking advantage of machine learning that uses repeated usage patterns the CRM systems coupled with AI will figure out alternatives to reduce manual work and trigger automatic actions based on a customer’s usage patterns.
3. Social Media Data
These days it is extremely difficult to give a complete customer experience excluding the social media data Earlier there was a quick downfall of social CRM concept but this year the concept of social CRM is going to emerge and stand out of the canopy again. CRM will again try to figure out how to involve and reintegrate with social media data to give quality customer experience. LinkedIn is emerging as the most popular data gathering system which the companies are using for accurate customer data.
4. Automatic Data Entry
This year CRM will look forward to replacing repetitive tasks like data entry so that sales reps can focus more on other vital aspects of strategies and closing deals. CRMs will try to prepopulate data and fill in the required fields from the available demographic and firmographic information and making the things more convenient. CRM seems to hold a little negative reputation that requires a lot of manual data entry from users thereby reducing adoption. So this year the major focus of the CRM industries will be reducing and eliminating repetitive work and automating the data entry process.
5. IoT Integration
IoT or Internet of Things are taking the over the businesses at a lightning pace. So we can be sure to witness that CRMs will soon begin to look forward to seamlessly integrate with the IoT device and take inputs from phones, wearables, home devices, etc to get a crystal clear picture of the customer. If this gets executed properly i.e incorporating and utilizing IoT data contextually in the process of sales it will unlock unsaid potential and opportunities going a long way making contributions to superior Customer Experience. With this CRM will be able to capture data and weave it into a dynamic and actionable customer data.
This year will definitely be an exciting year for the world of CRM. There will be innovation and enhancements around automation and a lot of experiment to cater to quality Customer Experience.
Don’t miss to grab some extra knowledge about CRM here.
References: forbes, it.toolbox, maximizer
Ajeet Singh
