Top CRM Trends of 2022

Customer Relationship Management is the combination of strategies, software, and processes, in order to manage all customer interactions. CRM services are important because it helps businesses build long-term customer relationships, increasing customer retention. 

CRM tools and software help businesses to track and analyze all customer interactions, through various channels. These channels include websites, social media, mail, email, contact forms, and more. Customer relationship management is beneficial for businesses of any scale, helping them to optimize marketing campaigns and business analytics. 

The top CRM trends of 2020

Focus on Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) is the most exciting business opportunity for companies in 2020. Superior customer experience is becoming the defining differentiating factor for most companies, in order to gain a competitive advantage. As acquisition costs of new customers are more expensive than retaining existing customers, companies are focusing on enhancing all their customer interactions, at various key touchpoints, to ensure better retention. Better customer experience inherently enhances a company’s revenue by creating customer loyalty and retention.

Augmentation of AI and automation
Artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize digital processes, creating greater accuracy and efficiency. AI-powered CRM guides users to create optimized campaigns, product configurations, and pricing. CRM with in-built predictive analytics is helping companies with predictive lead scoring, for better lead generation. Some of this software is equipped with NLP (Natural Learning Processing), which provides businesses with sentiment analysis capabilities, driving better customer relationships. It also has the ability to provide greater personalized solutions and recommendations, which ultimately improves customer engagement and retention. AI-powered CRM’s are saving businesses time and money, boosting ROI’s.

Mobile CRM
Global internet traffic from mobile devices grew from 0.7% in 2009 to 51.92% in 2020. Mobile CRM is quickly becoming a requirement in 2020. Mobile CRM benefits remote workers, as it provides all the CRM functionalities, with the added benefit of on-the-go access to all data, in real-time. It enables marketing, sales, and customer service teams to access important information, wherever they are. Mobile CRM systems have multiple features, such as strong security features, automated updates, intuitive interfaces, and cross-platform functionality.

Incorporation of social media into CRM
The increasing importance of customer experience has led to the incorporation of social media into CRM strategies and platforms. According to a recent CRM Land Article, a positive interaction on social media makes a user 71% more likely to buy from that business. Social media platforms have proven to be a remarkable channel for lead generation, and customer acquisition, retention, and advocacy. Social CRM is helping guide better customer service, through the proliferation of enhanced customer experience solutions. The usability of social media to highlight product or service issues to respective brands, simply by tagging the company’s official handle, has seen more users using these platforms as a tool for customer service. Social CRM is empowering customers, and it’s helping companies to enhance their overall customer interactions. We will see more companies adopting social CRM to boost their business bottom line.

User-friendly systems
Customer relationship management software are set to become even more user-friendly. Without usability, employees won’t be able to utilize and implement CRM effectively, which may prove to be costly and time-consuming for companies. AI capabilities have already enhanced and automated certain manual processes, thus easing the workload of the employees. Platforms like Salesforce are already implementing steps to make AI functionalities user-friendly for non-technical users. For companies to truly harness the benefits of CRMs, they must choose a system that is easy to adopt and use, for technical and non-technical employees alike.

Integration of CRM systems
In the future, we are likely to see a consolidation of departmental CRMs which would serve overall business objectives. Most current-generation systems are used for marketing, sales, and customer services. But these systems will evolve to integrate analytical software and customer data platforms. As more companies continue to gather and use second-party data sources to target prospects and customers, CRM systems are beginning to incorporate connections to IoT (Internet of Things) feeds. These consolidations will further help in streamlining CRM processes, understanding customers better, enhancing retention, customizing marketing promotions, and adjusting product pricing in real-time to meet demand. IoT and CRM integration will help to tailor personalized customer experiences and better marketing strategies, by gathering greater insights into the customer psyche, through analysis of external interactions, along with first-party data.

Final Thoughts

There is no doubt that customer relationship management is an integral part of any business strategy. Creating customer loyalty and advocacy is the ultimate goal of customer relationship management, and it helps to boost profit and revenue of corporations. At Alkye, we offer CRM services to our clients to help them stay on top of all their customer interactions and create a better customer experience.