Before the internet has revolutionized the world, product and services were basically market centered. Then came the internet, and the things have changed globally. In the early 2000, it was the era of the customer, who became more educated and well-informed of the fact that the key is to demand for better value for price. The internet also fueled higher market competition, increasing customer choices. This trend has been following in today’s society, which is the era of relationships. Businesses are very much customer-centric; they listen to their customers and try to meet their needs.  Customer Relationship Management or CRM has played a significant role in helping brands in their way to achieve this.  

CRM basically works on operational and analytical frameworks-

To add information to this, we must mention that- operational frameworks deal with the automation of business processes to build consistent, long-term and profitable relationships with specific customers. On the other hand, analytical frameworks focus on studying customer characteristics and behaviour to decide how to utilize resources among the most profitable group of customers.

Both these will get an impetus in the coming years. Let us discuss the 7 CRM trends that will prevalently dominate 2019.

Data Mining Becomes Prominent

It is a process that utilizes mathematical, statistical, AI and advanced machine learning techniques to extract useful information and at the same time, gather useful knowledge from the database.

Companies have already collected piles of information regarding their customer. But they might have failed to use it in the proper manner. With the inception of Artificial Intelligence and deep learning method, companies can successfully begin to extract data more effectively in order to avail utmost benefit for customers and themselves.  

Social CRM for Customer Relationships

Social CRM focuses the likes and dislikes of customers to engage in conversations and helps companies achieve the goal. Companies are excited to adopt social CRM not just to gather customer data from myriads of social media platforms, but also design a framework of experiences for the valued customers that make them avail the opportunity in the form of attention, advocacy and engagement.  

Companies Will Take an Extra Mile

Customer service has become important today. It is expected that company that provides better customer service will survive in the future. So, they need to offer an amazing customer experience to gain preferences. By 2020, customer will surpass price and quality and they are willing to pay up to 15 to 25% more for better and user-friendly customer experience.  

That’s why companies that are giving preferences to better customer experience and are going an extra mile for the sake of customer, will get rewarded with maximum customer value and transaction size.

Faster Response Time

It is true that despite customers collaborating with companies through various channels- social media, customer support, and so on, they expect prompt and fast responses. A study shows that over 70 to 80 % of adults said that adding values to their time was one of the most important thing a company could do in order to provide better service. Research by market experts found that poor response time can effectively increase customer churn by 20%.

Companies are taking this matter into concern and are using integrated tools like WhatsApp to respond faster to their customers. CRM enable companies to set stronger processes to boost their customer relationship.

CRM Integration Will Increase with Time  

At one side of the scale, CRM integration and adoption within companies is as low as 25%. Whereas, on the other end, it is as high as 90%. Companies with higher CRM adoption have also seen a steady rise in their productivity.

In the year 2019, in order to provide better customer experience and better business value, companies will hire talented professionals who just don’t have expertise in operating CRM tools, but also know how to use them to their benefit. This process will boost the average CRM adoption beyond the current percentage.

CRM Will Become More User-Friendly

Many CRM providers have entered the market, which, was earlier reigned by Adobe, Salesforce and Microsoft. The success rate of such tools will depend on how easy they have been made for usage. According to the survey report, users rank the most important aspect, ease-of-use feature for a CRM, like emailing and instant messaging, scheduling and data snapshots. So CRM companies will put emphasis to their customers in form of an improved customer experience.  

Cloud Will Remain a Popular Platform 

During the last few years, 80 to 90% of CRMs were operated from client’s systems. Today, majority of CRMs host on the cloud. This trend will remain valid for the year 2019. It is still sometimes before that Cloud becomes one of the popular platforms to host CRM software.

The same thing holds true for mobile CRM. While 60% of companies using mobile CRM stated meeting their targets, only 25% of the companies without cloud match theirs. With more than 340 million smartphone users in India, mobile has become the part and parcel of people’s lives. Hence, more people will adopt mobile CRM to get maximum benefit to their companies in 2019.