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4 CRM Trends from 2020

The past decade has seen an explosive adoption of CRM across industries, allowing companies to grow their sales, enhance their forecasts, and improve the overall experience of their customers. Innovations such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and hybrid clouds have been at the forefront of driving trends in CRM of the past few years. Will trends continue along this line this year or will they be more disruptive?

Here are the 4 main CRM trends from 2020 to watch out for.

1. CRM and Social Media

Virtually everyone nowadays with an internet connection is on social media and customers have found it to be the most convenient and accessible medium to interact with businesses. Companies are increasingly recognizing the importance of social media in building brand equity, enhancing customer experience, and improving their retention.

Unsurprisingly, this trend has been reflected in the CRM landscape. The incorporation of social media channels is increasingly becoming a standard for CRM platforms and strategies, facilitating a better, more personalized customer service and serving as new streams for gaining valuable data.

2. Increasing Role of AI

This year, rapid innovation in AI will continue to be a driving factor behind its increasing application in CRM platforms. The benefit AI brings to CRM is two folds. On the customer side, it allows for an ultra-personalized experience throughout their buyer’s journey. On the business side, it allows them to turn vast quantities of big data into useful insights and make better predictions on customer behavior. AI also allows businesses to achieve greater efficiency in their customer service by automating the most repetitive and tedious of manual tasks.

AI is also becoming more involved on the front end of CRM, with chatbots and voice assistants directly driving engagement from customers.

3. Increasingly Simplicity of Use

The expanding role of AI is also helping drive another trend in CRM, making the platforms more user-friendly. In the past, as CRM software has grown in size and function, the systems have suffered from increased complexity, The completixty of these systems cam make it difficult for the sales representatives to find the right information quickly.

Fortunately, vendors are realizing this shortcoming and are leveraging the help of AI to make their platforms more accessible for the non-technical user. Already, some leading CRM vendors such as Salesforce have already taken huge steps to make their software more accessible through the help of AI.

4. Unified CRM solutions

The importance of customer experience for business success is growing. In a Salesforce survey conducted last year, 84% of respondents ranked the importance of experience at the same level as a business’s products or services. The growing need for more tailored customer experience across the board is helping drive the consolidation of siloed departmental CRMs into a unified platform, featuring robust integration with back-end office applications.

Which CRM trend do you think would be the most disruptive this year and in 2021? Share your opinion with us in the comments below. Don’t forget to share if you found this article to be informative and useful.

If you would like to chat about how CRM can boost your business’ sales and customer experience, click here to arrange a time with our specialist.

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