Businesses that want to remain competitive must build stronger relationships with customers. This means CRM vendors will need to build systems that interact more with customers, rather than systems that are developed primarily for organizations, according to this article in Selling Point. Providers of CRM systems will have to continue developing and releasing CRM application modules that are bundled with or work on a large variety of handheld and/or wireless devices.
And CRM vendors will have to offer analytics through mobile devices so companies can have instant access to various kinds of analytics that were pretty much limited to being on computers in their offices.
To improve customer satisfaction, productivity, and financial performance, sales teams want to be able to transfer information via their mobile phones wherever they are—they don’t want to have to find Wi-Fi hotspots in public locations to access their companies’ CRM systems, according to the Selling Point article.
Companies will also use more analytics tools to get the most out of their CRM systems. These tools can predict the monetary value of various customers by using their purchase histories to predict their future purchases as well as determine cross-selling opportunities. These analytics tools, delivered via mobile devices, will allow sales teams to more rapidly analyze what’s happening within their businesses, and that will enable managers to make more informed decisions in real time.
Moving forward, CRM vendors and practitioners will have to pay close attention to social computing, mobile and customer analytics.
“We have facing us, social, mobile, an explosion of channels and an explosion of data,” says Gene Alvarez, (@galvar60) research vice president for Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc.
Alvarez says consumers have more technology than businesses have—something that has to change if they want to remain competitive. Gartner says that through 2015, analytics applications will remain one of the fastest-growing categories for business apps. And the research firm also predicts that by 2015, 80% of businesses will lose money if they don’t support Web-based customer service on mobile devices.
