Top CRM Trends to Watch in 2017

Jan 01, 2017 Anubhav Gupta

A new calendar year doesn’t necessarily mean seismic shifts in the attitudes, practices, and technologies that define an industry, but it does provide an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re heading. And so we tapped some of the CRM industry’s finest minds to identify 10 trends (listed here in no particular order) that companies should expect moving into 2017.

This year mobile will continue to dominate and grow as a preferred channel. A host of predictive technologies powered by artificial intelligence will assist professionals in completing tasks more quickly and efficiently. The transition from on-premises solutions to cloud computing will continue, albeit gradually, in spite of security concerns. Companies will increase their use of software that helps them better understand the journeys customers take with them. And tools that alter our reality will start to gain legitimate affiliation with CRM.

But if there is one overarching theme, it’s that customer expectations for excellent experiences are not going to let up anytime soon, and because of this, companies can’t afford to get too comfortable.

1. DEPARTMENT SILOS WILL CONTINUE TO FALL.

Traditionally, CRM has been divided into three customer-facing branches: sales, service, and marketing. That was fine in the past, but today’s customers want more, and they really don’t care about the title of the person (or machine) with whom they’re interacting; they simply want to accomplish their specific tasks with as little friction as possible.

“Customers want to be able to easily reach in and interact with a company, if it’s to research a purchase, to buy a product, to get support, or to get on-boarded,” says Kate Leggett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “They want effective interactions; they want to be able to fully complete their tasks in one go.”

That has forced professionals from sales, service, and marketing to take on functions that might historically have fallen outside of their purview. Service agents might be asked to cross-sell or upsell, pitching to the caller a product that might complement or improve upon what he already bought. A marketer might be called upon to respond to customer service inquiries through social media. Similarly, it behooves salespeople to know about the customer’s service history and to follow up after the sale has been made.

“The megatrend of customer success is breaking down the barriers between sales, marketing, and service,” explains John Ragsdale, vice president and research director at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA).

Ragsdale says that a push toward outcome-based selling is forcing customer success experts to become much more involved in the sales motions, participate in ongoing efforts to on-board new customers, and even monitor their adoption and consumption of a product or service to make sure that they’re interacting in the way the organization hopes they will. “Sales can’t make promises that customer success can’t deliver, so these teams must be much more in sync than ever before,” Ragsdale says.

Unfortunately, breaking down the walls between job titles has created some confusion among professionals as they try to access all of the information necessary to complete the tasks assigned to them. Technology vendors have been expected to keep up and integrate the data that exists in separate systems so those systems can communicate with one another, experts point out.

2. TECHNOLOGIES WILL CONVERGE.

When they can’t pull the data from disparate systems together, expect businesses to grow weary of so-called best-of-breed solutions that present integration, implementation, and deployment challenges, warns Leslie Ament, senior vice president and chief research officer at Hypatia Research Group. “Vendors with integration-ready partnerships, partnership ecosystems, and/or one-stop solutions are gaining ground in this marketplace,” she states.

This is especially important considering that most companies still buy their CRM technologies in separate pieces for each individual department. For instance, while a firm might elect to purchase Oracle’s Marketing Cloud for the marketing department, it might choose Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud for the sales organization. Those two must connect seamlessly to allow for cross-pollination.

3. KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND COLLABORATION WILL INCREASE.

It’s not only sales and marketing software that needs to be integrated. The need for a single product or suite of integrated products transcends departments and software types, and this can only happen when data is readily available across departmental lines.

As those lines dissolve, many of the large CRM vendors have come a long way in incorporating knowledge management (KM) into their core offerings. “There has been a huge consolidation in the space, with CRM vendors buying up the specialists to provide best-of-breed functionality in their core products, which has now become a significant competitive differentiator,” Ragsdale says. He cites Microsoft’s Parature and Aptean’s Knova offerings as examples. “But I think the best example is Oracle, which made significant investments in KM, acquiring RightNow, Q-go, and InQuira, among others,” he says.

These considerations are top of mind for organizations; TSIA’s 2016 Knowledge Management Survey found that 34 percent of companies expect to achieve a 20 percent to 30 percent improvement in productivity once employees start sharing knowledge more often. Further, 40 percent said an improvement of 30 percent or more was possible.

Of particular note here is the trend toward employees working from anywhere but the office, whether it’s from home, in the field, or at the airport waiting to board a plane for a client meeting.“With more service, sales, and marketing employees working from home or in remote geographic offices, providing [embedded] tools to easily ask a question or share lessons learned with a larger team is becoming more common,” Ragsdale says.

Like many other earlier CRM technologies, the market for collaboration tools was previously limited to niche vendors like Jive, Lithium, and Get Satisfaction. Today, however, more mainstream CRM vendors, including Salesforce.com, Oracle, and SAP, are showing up on Ragsdale’s list of top collaboration tool providers. The businesses that use their products demand nothing less.

“The transition we’re seeing is that [businesses are] realizing that the way to really move with the customer at scale, and with the speed of the customer journey, is to look to systems of insight rather than information,” says Jeff Nicholson, vice president of CRM product marketing at Pegasystems, a provider of business process management and customer engagement software. “At Pegasystems...we believe that in this new world, the insight should find you in the moment when it’s needed. And whether that’s guided to customer-facing employees or the customers themselves, really they’re looking for the actions that guide them as to what they should be doing, not just the data they should be using to find answers. That’s a big transformation, and it’s a different way of thinking than we’ve seen in the past.”

4. USERS WILL BE BETTER ABLE TO BLEND CHANNELS.

Ament anticipates another move within organizations: enabling agents to blend channels, with a single interface that lessens their need to toggle between screens and applications to accomplish their increasing list of tasks.

It’s important, Leggett says, “to deliver [business insights] to the CRM user in the flow of the work that they’re doing.”

Most of the major CRM players have started to investigate such technologies in a big way. Salesforce.com, for instance, has been making noise around its Einstein AI solutions. Pegasystems has invested in robotic automation to help with routine tasks. Oracle has introduced adaptive intelligent cloud applications that tackle common ground. Similarly, IBM’s Watson’s cognitive computing tools learn over time to cut corners. It wouldn’t be surprising to see others entering this market in the near future.

5. BEHAVIORAL INSIGHTS WILL GO DEEPER.

Another growing trend in 2017 will be the continued extension of customer journey analytics to provide insights beyond simply what people are doing to the why behind it. “Without understanding the why, customization can only go so far,” says Yuping Liu-Thompkins, chair of the marketing department at the Strome College of Business at Old Dominion University in Virginia.

Of course, the question of why is not easy to answer, she says, because it goes beyond tracking typical behavior. “You might need to bring additional insights from social media, from traditional marketing research. There’s more of that qualitative insight that needs to come into the CRM system,” she says.

And there’s a growing need to integrate customer service phone records with transactional data and marketing campaign analysis information, Liu-Thompkins emphasizes.

6. CRM WILL BECOME (EVEN) MORE AUTOMATED.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, machine learning, deep learning, virtual reality, intelligent assistants, and a host of other buzz terms, the talk of robots taking over bubbles up in our culture more than ever. And, according to analysts, the chatter is at least partly legitimate.

Leggett suggests that customers are definitely not interested in interacting with humans if they don’t have to. According to her company’s research, 75 percent of business professionals indicate that buying work products from a website is more convenient than doing so from a sales rep.

In customer service, the idea is similar. Leggett holds that customers use self-service channels as their first point of contact and only make a phone call as an “escalation point.”

Consequently, the trend, Leggett says, is to automate as many customer interactions as possible to enable customer self-service. “What this means for companies is that they need to make self-service journeys easier.”

In the coming year, companies will be wise to use new tools for submitting tickets, tracking orders, scheduling service visits, and recommending content, among other tasks.

It’s important to remember, however, that customers don’t necessarily want to feel as though they are interacting with a machine, even if that’s what they’re doing. For this reason, Nicholson suggests blending machine-based interactions with human interactions through conversational interfaces. “The opportunity and challenge that exists for those who implement these approaches is to do it in a way that respects individuals, has empathy for their situations, and…is proper and transparent.”

7. ROUTINE TASKS WILL GET MORE STREAMLINED.

The appeal of automation is not strictly limited to customers. All business professionals are also consumers, after all, and there are many things they’d rather do than go through hoops to achieve their goals. It’s no surprise, then, that chatbots, virtual assistants, intelligent assistants, and other such tools have begun to gain traction. Experts expect them to play an even more dramatic role in customer-facing professionals’ day-to-day activities.

To gain an edge on their competition, salespeople, for instance, will rely on tools to streamline product and price configurations, personalized customer recommendations, price negotiations, and general support interactions. If a salesperson can save 10 minutes or a half hour speaking into a mobile device to log notes about a sales meeting, that’s time better spent elsewhere.

It’s fortunate that with technological developments, “more firms are starting to mine the gold they have in their CRM systems,” observes Jim Dickie, a research fellow at CSO Insights. For decades, he says, managers have told salespeople to enter data into CRM, and now with more options, users can analyze that wealth of Big Data to glean insights into prospect profiling, pricing optimization, fact-based forecasting, proactive churn identification, and other areas that demand attention.

8. ADOPTION WILL RISE (FINALLY).

Look for technology to also continue to help the CRM industry overcome the adoption challenges that have long been its greatest obstacle. Because it was a chore, many professionals simply didn’t like to use CRM. Gamification is one way software vendors are making it more enjoyable to use CRM systems. Companies like Badgeville (recently acquired by CallidusCloud) offer tools that are meant to stimulate competition and participation among sales teams and individuals.

But if they have any hope of driving employee engagement across the board, gamification tools will need to be easy to use, experts maintain. Indeed, vendors have placed a heavy focus on making tools that resemble what professionals have grown accustomed to in their personal lives.

Liu-Thompkins observes, for example, that compelling visualizations and displays have helped marketing and sales professionals make better use of Big Data to gain actionable insights that lead to desired outcomes. “It took the technology role out a little bit, because the regular marketing and sales individuals might be able to use these tools and not have to struggle a whole lot in terms of what the data really means,” she says.

At the same time, the ability to leverage complex technologies is reaching everyday users, according to Leggett. One need not be a data scientist in a lab coat, capable of building out sophisticated algorithms and models, to make an impact, she says; CRM vendors have been making concerted efforts to infuse their products with predictive and prescriptive analytics that put intelligent recommendations in the hands of ordinary business users.

9. CRM WILL BECOME A LITTLE MORE VERTICAL.

While it is by no means becoming the norm for companies to invest in CRM systems that are designed specifically for use in one industry or another, analysts point out that larger CRM vendors are offering additional software and services that apply to a number of verticals.

Ament says that “embedding industry-specific and repeatable workflow business processes into customer engagement interactions” will pick up even more steam in the coming months. “This is especially evident in process-driven industries such as pharmaceuticals, financial services, and manufacturing sectors.”

Leggett argues that the trend is veering toward a more “lightweight verticalization.” The new software packages, she says, are “not the heavyweight vertical offerings that people had a decade ago that scripted the end-to-end industry process. It’s more the lightweight verticalization to offer data models, user experiences, UI labels, and extensions for a particular industry.”

Leggett points out that Microsoft has 32 industry templates, and Oracle 16 or 17. Similarly, Salesforce.com offers Financial Services and Health Clouds. “And again, it’s not end-to-end, deep verticalization, but giving companies a jumping-off point to allow them to leverage [the] industry expertise of CRM vendors for these lightweight vertical processes,” she says.

10. CRM WILL START TO EXPLORE ENHANCED REALITIES.

Cutting-edge technologies that involve enhanced realities, notably virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), are still in their early days, but the future of CRM has room for them all. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that limitations around AR/VR/MR tools will start to erode as companies experiment with them and set the stage for larger implementations.

The foundation was laid in 2016 with the Pokémon Go game, which inspired consumers and businesses alike to take notice. While the use cases for augmented reality are still a bit narrow, more widespread adoption isn’t far off.

“Augmented reality is there for field service,” Leggett says. For instance, making use of video can allow a service technician to call a more senior employee to get a second opinion. By layering on augmented reality, he can guide the junior technician without having to be there himself.

When it comes to these types of applications—or any other business application, for that matter—company leaders this year will be inundated with all sorts of new technologies promising to revolutionize customer experiences. They will have a world of choices, from both tried-and-true industry staples to some innovative and unfamiliar start-ups. That’s why, when entering into any of these spaces, business leaders will need to do their homework now more than ever.