Top 7 CRM Trends for 2020

The CRM market will continue to grow in 2020 and the forthcoming years. The buzzwords for the year 2020 are found to be cloud computing, data protection, social CRM and mobility. While more and more companies are recognizing the importance of customer care and loyalty and using professional CRM solutions, the IT infrastructure is characterized by increasing virtualization. Online marketing, social media, data suppliers and communication with customers via various channels require a resilient and, above all, secure IT infrastructure. We see the cloud as a growth driver for CRM. The good news for small and medium-sized businesses is that using the cloud offerings is getting easier and easier.

Marketplaces already offer an attractive portfolio of cloud solutions, support and billing are provided from a single source. This lowers the entry hurdles. The advantages of CRM as a Service are obvious: Companies can start acquiring and retaining customers with modern and lean CRM software without large initial investments.

The Era of Customer Experience

No wonder, we are living in the age of customer experience, and each business is only revolving the consumer choices and preferences. According to a Salesforce Survey 2019, over 84% of respondents agreed that to them customer experience is as important for them as the product or service itself. So, it’s simple, people opt for the brand which offers the best of experience. Knowing the fact, business organization are increasingly using more robust CRM platforms. With an efficient CRM implemented within your enterprise, you get a host of tools for your marketing, sales and customer service team that can empower and boost their CRM efforts. CRM system helps organization with precise targeting which is crucial for providing personalized customer experience.

Privacy

The discussion about spies by international secret services has left many customers very unsettled. The requirements and questions regarding data security and data protection have therefore risen sharply in recent months. CRM providers from the USA in particular are experiencing massive economic pressure. Customers want clarity about data storage: where is the data stored and how and who has access to it? Anyone who does not provide a satisfactory answer here will be left behind.

Hosted Private Clouds as an Attractive Alternative

As an alternative to the public cloud, the private cloud is therefore still attractive. For small and medium-sized companies, the so-called ‘hosted private cloud’ is an attractive model as a managed service. Here, customers receive cloud software that is located in an isolated area at the SaaS provider or on a server in their own data center. The cloud provider takes care of maintenance and administration. Most public cloud providers are not prepared for this with their standardized platforms. That is why there will be movement here next year.

Social CRM Is in Demand

At the user level, the topic of social CRM has finally reached the SME sector. Many companies have started to build their own social CRM channels in the past few months and are now rounding off customer service and marketing. While providers from the B2C area are pioneers here, the B2B sector has slowly caught up. The topic of lead generation and maintenance is important in the B2B area and therefore there will be a greater demand for solutions. B2B and B2C users have in common that more and more communication takes place directly via the social networks and part of the email communication is shifted here. Connections to the chat and messaging functions of the platforms are therefore in demand.

No More CRM Without Mobility

The mobile office is now a reality thanks to smartphones and tablets. Users are no longer satisfied with the use of restricted software via mobile devices. Because customers expect quick and competent answers – no matter where the user is. If a company or its employees cannot be addressed at all times, this is a clear competitive disadvantage. CRM providers without a mobile solution will simply disappear from the market.

Automation

Automated sales processes are in great trend, as they tend to help sales representative to do their job more accurately, effectively and faster. Enhanced tools of CRM are offering new ways in which automated sales processes can shorten sales cycle. Not only this, but automation is also being vastly used in customer interaction logging, data entry and for personalized email sequence. With some CRMs, numerous marketing automation features also come along which allows to achieve more within less time and fewer resources.

The Power of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is playing a central role everywhere, and also within several aspects of marketing and sales including CRM. According to Forbes, CRM is transforming the CRM world by easing data retrieval and data ingestion, by providing sentiment analytical capabilities of the system, by providing better data integrity, and also through predictive lead scoring and personalized recommendations and solutions.