Latest trends in CRM to take businesses by storm
“The cost of acquiring a new customer can be anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.”
Businesses are vying to ace the competition of monopoly where firms already own almost all the market on a type of goods or services available in the market. Hence, with a slew of “me-too” organizations, gathering the extra customer attention and largest share in targetconsumption has been a difficult task.
However, today,with theadvent of social media and smartphones, Customer Relationship Management softwares have simplified functionaries of the market. Organizations get an added advantage of calibrating their operations with relevant inputs on consumer behaviour and retention. What used to be essentially a manual process has now gained traction due to its marriage with the best of technology.
With the following trends ready to augment business operations, circa-2017, CRM platforms are in constant upheaval of evolution:
• Contextual Intelligence will be the marketers “favourite partner”
In this era of hyper localized promotions, customers have become increasingly savvy and have become sensitized in separating the worthy from the waste. Becoming a “best-friend brand” is the only viable option left to break through the stalemate of marketing muddle, while gaining customers attention and most importantly, trust. A surge in CRM for real-time hyper-targeting, catering to micro-segments of customers,is set to take up the market by storm.
Basically CRMs backed with contextual intelligence are sailing them to an island of prolific success.
• Social CRM undergoing a facelift
Regardless of the unrivalled popularity of social platforms, CRM has yet to accurately harness social media as its ally. Optimizing the rise of social CRM would turn to be a game changer for events. . 6 years ago only 12% of businesses used cloud based CRM – This figure has now increased to 87%!The large number of interactions happening on social mediums is not something that CRM platforms can afford to miss. Growing retention activities on all social channels and a deepening emphasis on social influence and sentiment analysis is set to fuel the rise of Social CRM.In fact, the rises of customer support in mediums such as Facebook via both humans and bots, as piqued the interest of software companies as well as marketers to take the social route for CRM.
• Mobile CRM is set to rule the roost
While only 22% of reps using non-mobile CRM are able to meet the sale targets,Research by Innoppl Technologies showed that 65% of sales reps who have adopted mobile CRM have achieved their sales quotas. Mobility is helping businesses to increase productivity by not only mobilising the workforces but also restyling the end user experiences in our daily lives. To the date till today, the process however has been iterative and gradual, with no quantum leaps.
Change is inevitable and in today’s competitive marketing landscape, smart businesses are doing everything they can to gain an upper hand, the wisest being the rigorous incorporation of CRM into operations. The ongoing expansion in CRM will create a robust framework for both marketers and consumers to bank on, blindfolded.
