Business today revolves around customers more than ever. The biggest challenge for any organization is to create an excellent customer experience.
In a survey conducted by Salesforce 2019, 84% of respondents agreed that the experience a company delivers is as relevant as its products and services.
Delivering a better experience than your competitors will help you boost customer loyalty and, at the same time, attract more prospects. Keeping this in mind, every company is trying to upgrade its existing CRM with the latest technologies.
Earlier, CRM was only used as a database to collect and store customer’s information. However, today’s CRM platform is far more robust than its humble beginning. It now empowers sales, marketing, and customer service teams with a host of tools to drive them towards growth.
Here are the latest CRM trends that you need to keep pace with if you want to gain a competitive edge for achieving success.
Let’s begin.
List of Top 5 CRM Trends
1. The Merging of CRM, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence
Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every single day. (source)
You can’t ignore the importance of big data in today’s time. In the upcoming years, the success of CRM will rely on the fact that how effectively it can utilize big data and create a personalized experience for customers.
With the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), CRM is evolving and leading towards a sophisticated system. The latest CRM trend is all about collecting and analyzing customer data from various touchpoints, including social media, marketing campaigns, sales, and contact platforms.
These analytics tools can provide actionable insights to strengthen strategies, enhance CRM software capabilities to forecast demands, and fuel predictive analytics.
The deadly combination of big data, AI, and CRM will provide 360-degree insights on their customers that will increase the chance of conversions.
2. Harnessing the Power of Voice Technology
The next big CRM trend is the adaptation of voice technology.
Even though sales meetings have gone mostly virtual, it has been seen that sales rep only spend 34 percent of their time in selling the products.(source)
The rest is spent on administrative tasks, such as data entry, managing emails, creating follow-up tasks, and more.
To increase productivity and reduce redundant work, voice technology is the answer. The advancement of speech recognition and natural language processing can help with logging calls, spotting key phrases in a transcript, and generating call summaries.
Furthermore, it can help to automate tasks like scheduling meetings, sending follow-up alerts, and much more.
In fact, big companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are also providing funding to a company named Tact.ai that owns smart voice assistant technology for B2B enterprises.
Clearly, voice engagement is going to be the next frontiers CRM platforms will be exploring.
3. Making First-Class Customer Service the Priority
Customer service has always been the number one deciding factor for customers, whether to build long-term relationships with the brand or not.
Companies trying to meet their customer’s expectations is quite a challenging task. One particular instance is how customers expect companies to communicate with them in real-time. But in reality, the response time still remains long in most cases.
Besides, research by Gartner shows that poor response time led to an increase in customer churn rate by up to 15%. That’s a big loss.
To meet this demand, the new CRM is coming up with solutions like AI-driven chatbots. Currently, only 23 percent of companies are using chatbots, which is going to double in the next 18 months.
The primary purpose of chatbots is to reduce the workload of customer representatives. It can be used to handle common queries by customers, greet customers when they call and provide assistance to agents with recommendations when they are tackling customers.
This new CRM trends will enable customer service reps to concentrate on more complex issues.
Also, Read: Chatbots Vs Mobile Apps: What Your Business Really Needs?
4. Boosting Relationships With Mobile CRM and Social CRM
Well, mobile CRM and social CRM are not new technologies. However, they are going to gain momentum in 2020.
The sales representatives are always on the move. The need for mobility and the advancement in mobile technology indicate a push for CRM platforms to provide more mobile functionalities.
The new-age CRM technology will be fully functionally on smartphones, tablets, and other devices that are connected to the internet.
Not only that, we can’t ignore the importance of social media platforms. Social CRM refers to the integration of CRM with social media channels to widely engage with your audience and customers.
Customer’s increasing demand for constant connectivity and personalized experience with companies has given rise to social CRM. The new CRM trend will not only collect information from social channels but also help in designing experiences that customers will offer value in exchange for their attention.
More importantly, all these functionalities will be available without compromising the security of user data.
5. Creating a Single, Shared View of Customer Identity
With the power of the Internet of Things and AI, the future CRM platform will offer advanced integration with various data sources and other third-party applications. This is necessary so that CRM will be empowered with even more information on customers to expand its utility.
This new CRM trend will enable the system to track external interactions with millions of customers at the same time. The most significant advantage will be that marketers have a complete, unified view of customer data sources.
As of now, only half of the marketers get a unified view of their customer’s information. But if companies want to handle the complexities of managing data and drawing insights from it, they will need to accommodate the new-age CRM technology.
Besides, marketers will be able to interact with their customers in meaningful ways and in real-time.
Conclusion
More and more companies are going to adopt CRM solutions to provide better customer service and streamline their marketing and sales activity. By getting ahead of CRM trends, you will be able to take your business to newer heights.
Make sure to choose the best CRM software by looking into the features that you require.
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