Customer experience (CX) is still king in 2020. Modern customer relationship management (CRM) must be used as a foundational technology for customer engagement in order to deliver experiences that keep your customers coming back for more. Here are our top five trends for CRM in 2020:

  1. Self-service for end-to-end customer journey support increases. More customers self-serve as the first point of contact with companies. B2B buyers want to self-educate rather than talk to a seller by a factor of nearly three to one; customers access self-service content and processes more than agent-assisted channels. We see companies increasing their investment in self-service technologies: marketing resource management solutions to track marketing outcomes, commerce solutions, and customer-facing configure price quote (CPQ) solutions, chatbots, knowledge management, and more.
  2. AI and automation continue to improve CRM outcomes. AI-fueled CRM guides sellers and agents through the right actions, empowers them with the right insights, and optimizes campaigns, product configurations, and pricing. We see companies prioritize robotic process automation (RPA) and bots that have clear ROI. However, we see companies struggle with larger, transformative initiatives to digitize and automate core processes.
  3. Hyperpersonalization underpins true one-to-one interactions. Customers expect engagement, tailored to their history, preferences, context, and intent. We see CRM use customer intelligence gleaned from unstructured interaction data to fuel true one-to-one conversations. The data will include broader demographic data, conversational styles, buying indicators, social data, life events, and relationship graphs.
  4. Unified CRM boosts targeted role-based experiences. Great customer experiences rest on tailored role-based experiences, delivered by a unified CRM with tight coupling to back-office applications — not by departmental, siloed CRMs. We see the continued consolidation of departmental CRMs into broader business solutions.
  5. Customer value models accelerate ongoing customer success. As more companies shift to subscription models, renewals and expansions become more important to their success. We predict that success, onboarding, and CRM technologies will blur; this will provide all frontline personnel with better visibility of the customer’s value to the organization. Also, new CRM licensing models that focus on business value and outcomes, rather than software consumption, will emerge.

Read more about our CRM trends here.