CRM in 2020 - it's all about the customer

With growing interest in AI, Computing Delta predicts customer relationship management will catch up with other enterprise IT systems in 2020

Tools to manage the customer relationship date back decades, but have evolved in leaps and bounds in the opening years of the 21^st Century. That development is set to continue in 2020, and Computing Delta has produced a series of forecasts about the changing face of the market over the next 12 months - revolving around artificial intelligence, the customer experience and channel-less CRM.

Artificial intelligence

Areas of technology like cloud, business intelligence and service desk have been fast to adopt automation, but CRM has lagged behind. The lack of impact from AI and machine learning have reinforced the idea that CRM is a business solution, not a technological one.

As the below chart shows, automation was far down the list of factors influencing the choice of CRM solution in Delta research.

Net ratings are the sum of ‘High' (6 or 7 out of 7) ratings less the sum of ‘Low' (1-3 out of 7) ratings.

That sentiment is now shifting, with both major and smaller vendors like Salesforce and Hubspot investing heavily into AI; Salesforce in particular predicts a 250 per cent rise in AI use cases over the next two years.

One of the major benefits of AI is automation - enabling the off-loading of time-consuming manual tasks to robots and improving productivity for staff. But there's much more that it can achieve in CRM. For example, machine learning can analyse past contacts to build a profile of a customer, even predicting concerns so agents can address them proactively. In direct contact situations, chatbots will benefit from advances in natural language processing and neural networks to enhance their usefulness.

Finally AI-powered analytics can enhance the usefulness of data. The demand for data analysis has grown quickly as businesses begin to understand the importance of information, and applying AI and ML to it can extract additional value faster than a human. An IT leader in the financial services sector said:

"Typically you need someone to have an idea, to get the data, to figure out what they want to model. If you can put some machine learning/AI over it then maybe it can look for insights that typically a person wouldn't do, more quickly."

Customer experience

We are in the age of personalisation. End-users are unwilling to spend weeks learning a new programme, and the days of software with a flat grey UI are numbered. The user experience is now commonly thought to be just as important as the usefulness of a CRM product.

Making these systems easier to use has the added benefit of making data more accessible and easier to analyse for non-technical members of staff, like marketers.

As well as a revised UI, CRM vendors are exploring a new form of control in voice. Vendors like Salesforce, Zoho and Microsoft already include some voice capabilities, with differing levels of functionality; some as simple as data entry, others adding the ability to find information in the system and accomplish tasks. Including voice requires significant alterations to how marketers and sales teams use CRM, and how they and IT work with that data.

We will also see an increased move towards verticalisation, whereby a CRM is adjusted for relevance in a specific industry or sector such as healthcare or manufacturing. Vertical CRMs have been the subject of criticism before - they lack flexibility, tend to be produced by niche players and cost more - but if you can purchase a horizontal system like Microsoft Dynamics or SugarCRM and tweak it to fit, many of these issues disappear.

Channel-less CRM

CRM monitors business-customer interaction across multiple channels: phone, email, text, messaging apps and social media. The latter has been rising in importance in recent years and will continue to do so in 2020.

Companies can use social media to build a presence in a space where customers are already spending time. Being able to reply in real-time both fosters a personal relationship with the consumer and builds promotes the brand's customer service - and can make customers more likely to offer repeat business.

There are many different social media platforms, though, and even more channels for communication. Giving a customer their choice about how to communicate is fundamental to ensuring that they come away satisfied, but keeping track of all those different channels can be a logistical nightmare.

In 2020, CRM will shift away from omni-channel and towards a channel-less approach, with a single piece of software to handle multiple lines of communication, increasing the efficiency for salespeople, service agents and other users. The focus will then be on the relationship with the user, rather than the way they are getting in contact.

CRM has long been key to business success, and with the transition to the cloud - and free software like Zoho's basic tier - it is easier than ever for companies to deploy their own system. Even startups are beginning to invest in the market; we expect to see tools specifically designed for SMEs adding some CRM functionality in 2020, while established CRM vendors work to attract sole-traders and other firms.

The above predictions come via Delta's CRM report. We conducted this report with 300 senior IT leaders in the UK and Europe. These IT leaders have purchased, implemented and have deep insight into the workings of these tools. To see the complete findings, please click here to get an online demo of the service, or watch this video to see Delta in action.