As the old Greek adage goes, “The only constant is change”, it applies to the CRM industry too, which continues to evolve every year. Times are changing, which means implementing innovations and new ideas to connect your customers are going to experience a flip of the coin.
Nowadays, delivering the best products and services isn’t enough for business growth. Building relationships with customers has become an absolute necessity to stimulate retention, loyalty, and trust. This is where CRM solutions come into action.
Brands worldwide are choosing CRM to equip a more conversational approach with their customers. So, what exactly is CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) software leverages existential as well as upcoming technology to use customer data and drive hyper sales growth. CRM platforms achieve this by deriving analysis of customer interactions and data retrieved throughout the process.
CRM is emerging as a one-stop solution that helps businesses make data-driven decisions to improve sales and boost revenue. But as we are entering a new decade, some notable key trends will shake up the industry in 2021.
So, in this post, we will discuss what direction is the CRM software currently heading and trends which your company must be aware of to remain at the forefront of innovation.
Here are the top CRM trends for 2021 and beyond :-
1) Artificial Intelligence Is Going To Rule
There is a lot of buzz around artificial intelligence and honestly, AI is going to be a big part of the CRM. Some projections depict that CRM- related AI are expected to raise global business revenue by $1.1 trillion by the end of 2021. AI-powered CRM solutions will use data points in the coming years to foresee questions or make predictions about the additional details customers can need.
2) IoT And CRM
IoT is the biggest game-changer in almost every industry and the same goes for CRM. In the year 2021, we can see the integration of CRM and IoT at a bigger scale. CRM and IoT combined brings inummerable benefits such as an advanced level of personalization, increases customer satisfaction, improves customer retention, detects product performance issues, and helps deliver personalized marketing campaigns.
3) Voice Technology And Conversational UI
For the evolution of SaaS tools, voice technology is important as it acts as a key factor for accessibility. A study says 94% of users consider voice technology easy to use, saves more time, and improves their quality of life. Voice assistants help sales personnel track customer data faster and inform their teams about it. Salesforce and SAP, the known CRM solution providers have too embraced voice technology.
4) Highly Focused On Customer Experience
Customer experience will always be at the forefront and the core of CRM. Brands worldwide need to keep the customer experience at the top priority. Other than that, a CRM system must have a user-friendly interface, easily accessible to analyze data that should cater to the business’s unique needs. Live chat for quick assistance, automated knowledge bases, data enrichment to demonstrate the customer’s journey are some sure ways to create a rewarding CX.
5) Social And Mobile Crm Will Pave The Way
Integration of networks of social media and mobile with CRM gives organizations insights into their brand perseverance. The mobile and social CRM software boosts your brand awareness and has a direct impact on the sales graph. By promoting your products/services on preferred channels, brands can optimize service levels and the multi-channel customer experience.
6) Self-service CRM Will Grow
As automation-enabled self-service becomes more synonymous with CRM, it helps in more contact management tasks. Various platforms provide chatbots that lead prospects towards the sales and marketing pipeline, gather details, and deliver personalized content. On the consumer side, this self-service is time-saving, stress-free, and budget-friendly. For an instance, the chatbots of drift and Hubspot guide customers through the right channels to deliver actionable insights.
7) Integration Of CRM With Other Processes
In 2021, we can see more advanced CRM integrations with credible data sources and third-party applications. It will be a step up towards the future CRM systems and will provide more consumer knowledge. It will also extend platform functionality as CRM platforms will be able to track the external interactions with business processes and data sources such as marketing automation.
8) Analytics Would Be An Integral Part Of CRM
Advanced analytics are coming to the fingertips placing organizations in the best position to discover challenges, solutions, and ample opportunities. With advanced analytics, organizations will know how their sales pipeline works, how satisfied consumers are, and what lead will churn out.
9) From Omnichannel To One-channel
Most CRM strategies are focusing on an omnichannel or a multi-channel approach, however, CRM trends for 2021 indicates a movement towards a single channel approach to CRM. CRM experts predict that communication channels will be turned into one single piece of software that handles all channels.
10) New Type Of CRM User
28% of the millennials think CRM applications are extremely critical to their success as compared to 18% of Generation X. As Gen Z and millennials continue to gain power and coming generations enter and adapt to the new workplace, this CRM trend is going to expand. More and more teams will become tech-centric in this decade and will focus on optimizing efficiency through CRM technology.
Conclusion
CRM equips the massive share of the software market, and we are going to grow bigger in the coming years. If we are going to one overall prediction for CRM trends in 2021, more businesses are likely to use CRM technology to eradicate or automate unhealthy processes. Trends like mobile, social, IoT, AI are likely to stay with us in 2021, and organizations can achieve higher revenue gains and engage their customer base in organizations.
Are you looking to effortlessly implement Customer Relationship Management software in your organization? Contact Cloud Analogy, a leading CRM implementation partner that can help set up, configure, and customize CRM to meet your business needs for an ever-evolving growth.
Sachin Arora
Scrum Master and Principal Solutions Architect
Sachin, a renowned Scrum Master and Principal Solutions Architect at Cloud Analogy, has rich experience when it comes to working on process improvement in a fast-paced environment maintaining high level of quality in all deliverables. Sachin's expertise lies in varied hardware and software environments including Cloud technologies such as Salesforce, AWS, Cloud Foundry & Google App Engine and Mobile.Hire the best Salesforce Development Company. Choose certified Salesforce Developers from Cloud Analogy now.
