For most, the end of the year signals the holiday season. For analysts, it signals prediction time. Thought leaders and experts across the globe bombard the blogosphere, offering up their opinions, expectations, and prophesies for the upcoming year.
2010 was an exciting year in the CRM space. Promising new products from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce and other majors were released; we saw a burst of interest in the social CRM (SCRM), CRM SaaS /Cloud computing and major vendors added new functionality to their flagship products, stiffening competition in the enterprise software arena. What can we expect to see in the year ahead? Here are some CRM prophesies for 2011.
Prophesy 1: CRM mates Social Networks
One of the most impactful trends in CRM in the upcoming year would have to be integration of social. This has already started to happen. However, for successful execution, social cannot be an add-on -- rather, it has to be fully integrated into the CRM platform and business processes. In other words, it's not enough to just have a Twitter search in a separate tab without tying it back to the contact record. Simply adding a Twitter handle to the contact record is also not enough to qualify as Social CRM. It has to flow through every process, and relevant communications have to be captured in the record, so that everyone in the organization can be on the same virtual page.
In this journey Privacy is going to continue to get mindshare in 2011. Businesses and consumers will continue to define the boundaries of what data is OK to collect, for how long it's OK to keep, and in what ways can it be accessed and referenced with other data. Platforms like Facebook that collect and sell social data will also walk the line between businesses wanting to use this information and consumers wanting to protect it.
Prophesy 2: CRM floats in the Cloud
How quickly will the industry's migration to the cloud take place, and what will this mean to more 'traditional' (i.e. on-premise, enterprise software) vendors? Salesforce.com is the clear success story but which other CRM vendors will benefit from customers shifting their CRM efforts to the cloud? On a related note, we should also be watching the movement of customer data not just to the cloud, but integrated IN the cloud. Salesforce is leading the charge with their integration of Jigsaw (appropriately enough, labeled 'Data Cloud') - there is tremendous value to be gained by companies integrating their customer and prospect data with third-party services and data, but at the same time there are huge privacy implications. Oracle too is seriously building its Cloud Capability and there is some undercover operation to come overnight with exciting version of CRM on Demand. The war in the Cloud is gonna intensify and hope you will see some exciting thunderbolts and Lightening and rain some good offers to Business Community.
Prophesy 3: CRM 3.0
If it wasn’t clear before: we now absolutely live in an instantaneous and interconnected world that our CRM processes must reflect. Growth of open CRM systems, particularly “as a service” platforms will accelerate to leverage social, mobile and global dimensions of essentially the same issue of managing and facilitating customer relationships. Self-serve will gain more prominence as technology makes it easier to facilitate cross-communication among customers. Salesforce.com’s launch of database.com will trigger a new trend towards taking the PAIN out of everything data-related: creating, consolidating, cleansing, appending and extracting intelligence. The idea is bring all these functions into one place, including applying domain expertise. You could argue that benefits might be limited to a particular platform, but this phenomenon will gain momentum as more CRM systems “open-up” as well.
Prophesy 4: Intelligence Cocktail
Embedded BI/predictive actions: Insights are good, but actions are better because ultimately they drive revenue, save costs or increase margins. Companies already invested in CRM will seek to get more out of it by increasing high value analytic content and driving consistent actions across and within all channels. With analytic integration further facilitated by tools such as predictive modeling markup language (PMML), the latency from data to actions will decline dramatically. Micro Analytics: Let’s hit singles. That’s the message we are hearing from many of our clients: understand and solve a key problem critical to success of our major initiative(s). Prospecting and lead generation, new product launch, multi-channel adoption and category penetration are some areas we are asked to solve specific challenges. And it is understandable, given the pressure to show results fast it is difficult to address a number of problems or prepare infrastructure to so do.
Prophesy 5: CRM -One for the Road
I think 2011 will be the year when CRM finally hits the mobile device. With the take off of Apples iPAD and a fresh wave of applications to support mobile and offline working finally hitting the pockets of millions of information workers. Mobile CRM which has always been a "maybe someday" will finally become a "yes, let's do it" . All mobile and Crm vendors geared to deliver the mobile crm sleek and Sexy. Call it Technology, Competition and whatever this is one Street Smart Application that’s gonna make some CRM Rock stars
Prophesy6: From CRM to CEO (Customer Experience Optimization)
The role of CRM needs to change dramatically from Customer Relationship Management to Customer Experience Optimization (CEO). Currently CRM is a database that other functions in the company use. CRM collects and holds customer data and other functions like marketing, loyalty programs, etc. access this data and use it as needed to fulfill their roles and needs. CEO is a attitude supported by CRM application which manages and approves all areas of a company that impact customers. CEO predicts the complete future expected lifecycles of customers along all the separate dimensions of their behavior using predictive analytics with CRM database. Customers are the most valuable asset for any company and they need a corporate department whose role is to optimize their lifetime value to the organization – not just collect their data. CEO will assure that all interactions with customers are for things the customer is expected to actually want or be interested in learning about, and that there are not too many interactions. Only the interactions that are best for the company (which would be those that build lifetime loyalty from the customer) are allowed to reach the customer.
We cannot delay this CRM Prophecies in 2011 and but to be part of it.. Customers are getting too smart and we are falling too far behind. We cannot stand frozen in fear and complain that we do not know how to begin and that no one has done this yet. Competitors will start to do this. The only question to answer is how far behind your competition can you afford to fall and how that will affect your relationships with your customers – and how long it will take you to catch up.
Get Ready, Steady, Go………….2011 Happy New Year Amigos
Loving P&C
DC* Version 2.0.1.1
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