What Trends You Must be Aware of While Designing a CRM Strategy in 2019

It is essential for businesses to create and maintain a healthy relationship with their customers.

People in the management field already know as to how important it is to build a healthy customer relationship in business.

Customer relationship management helps the company by creating goodwill in the industry.

You can build goodwill in the market by addressing your customer’s problems in the market effectively. CRM system helps the organization with improving profitability and staying connected with the customers.

Benefits of CRM

Customer Relationship Management is very beneficial for an organization.

CRM helps to manage your customer data in a single place, and it also makes the employees more efficient and productive by following customer history and continuously adding reminders for the important meetings and sales calls. It helps to speed up your growth process and manages your growing database. CRM centralizes the data, and all the processes become automated. Thus, it sends auto emails and SMS to the customers. This helps in building a long-lasting relationship with your customers through small but meaningful gestures, such as sending your customers wishes on birthdays and anniversaries and festivals. You can also find out where to make improvements in the business. CRM solutions also add value through business intelligence and data mining which in other words is known as data warehousing.

Challenges in CRM

The change from manual to automatic operations is one of the most daunting tasks that you can face during the implementation of CRM because not all employees are well-versed with the developing technologies.

With software, you can never be too careful as there is always a risk that you can get hacked. Similarly, in CRM software the team who is using the software has to be extra careful while implementing the software. But if the employees are well trained and guided, they don’t have to worry about their information being leaked. There is always a chance of getting hacked, but the trained employees can stop the hacker at the very initial stage so that no sensitive data gets stolen. The CRM tool will slow down your activities a little because now you will have to record the whole conversation that you with your customer on the phone or take notes. This will slow you down in the short term, but in the long run, it will be beneficial for the organization. CRM tool requires a significant amount of investment and businesses usually do need to make a large amount of investment for the company’s growth. Because of the advancements in the technology field, the CRM software needs to be up to date in order to fulfill the needs of the company. And due to these software updates, training camps have to be set up so that the employees know how to use the software correctly.

Major CRM Trends in 2019

1. Conversational AI-Powered CRM

Artificial Intelligence combined with CRM will focus more on Informal CRM systems in 2019 and after.

So many new developments have been introduced in the CRM world such as face recognition and text recognition, and one of the developments that are yet to be launched in 2019 is voice functionalities. A lot of new advancements will be introduced in the year 2019. Similar to the voice functionalities on smartphones, Salesforce Einstein is an AI-powered CRM that has voice recognition and enables organizations to get information using voice commands. Voice recognition is changing our lives, and our work lives as everything is becoming simpler. Just by using our voice we can get our job done very easily, and we can access information very quickly through the mobile phone or other gadgets.

2. IoT in CRM for Proactive, Predictive and Prescriptive Customer Service

The future of customer service is IoT in CRM.

One of the main factors of CRM is believed to be IoT because it will boost CRM in terms of CRM software having to work for better organizations and improving sales, customer service and satisfaction. For example, such integration has the ability to analyze information collected from all the devices that are connected and if there are any issues then fixing them on even the slightest level.

Nowadays everything is getting connected to the network, and a lot of industries will get transformed and because of IoT in CRM. It will be able to manage this transformation as it will automate better customer service to solve queries quickly, efficiently and sometimes even before they occur. IoT will have a considerable impact on CRM in the year 2019 because as it will enhance and improve the functioning of CRM through a large amount of useful data that has been collected from customers and the potential customers.

3. An increase in Mobile CRM Usage

A mobile CRM provides all the CRM capabilities on most of the devices that can be connected to the network.

It is capable of real-time access at any place and any time. This trend will grow in 2019 because of advancements in the technological field. Mobile device usage is increasing day by day and because of that CRM user who use the system on their mobile phones and tablets will grow significantly as well.

Increase in Mobile CRM usage means that the efficiency will also increase, users will have access to more accurate information, improvement in customer’s experience and eliminating the need to learn new software. About 90% of companies have a CRM system, and it is evident that these systems work on different varieties of devices and internet speed.

4. Hyper- individualization for Unbeatable CX

The companies who have been using CRM systems for many years must be having a substantial amount of data in their systems, and that will help them to provide their customer with an unmatched deeply personalized customer experience. This trend will become quite evident in 2019. Deeply personalized or extremely personalized experience means delivering service where the customers feel valued and appreciated as the company understands them and know what the customers want and when they want it.

Deep personalization will be very important in 2019 and the years after that, as it will give companies a competitive edge on customer engagement and experience. Collecting the right data instead of more data and trying to answer the question to why instead of what.

5. Deep Personalization

The year where the companies will gather all the years of customer data to personalize experiences for their customers is 2019. The most important rule to maintain your customers is by making your customers feel valued. The trick is to target the needs of the customer before the customer itself, and you will make a lifetime customer. CRM has years and years of customer data, and it can be used to do that.

The world is transforming into a place where customer experience will enhance to become the key differentiator, and extreme personalization is the most popular path to it. You should make use of the customer data that you have to understand your customer and identify what their needs, wants and preferences are and then customize the experience with the help of Artificial Intelligence to make them feel valued. You should read about how you can use SugarCRM to improve your company’s customer experience.

6. CRM and Digital Transformation in 2019

Digital presence already very apparent and it will become more in the future. The amount of information that is available is increasing day by day, and the decisions that the companies have to make nowadays have become more critical such as making sure that they are targeting the correct customer, at the exact time and with the exact offer. And all of this possible with the customer related data that is available through digitalization.

In the year 2019, you need to have an expert understanding of your customers and potential customers and an excellent digital presence. This will help you in increased profits, strong customer relations and multi-channel experience. The digitally transformed companies have customers that are 60% more likely to test a new product or service from their choice of brand, 40% more likely to suggest your brand and 20% more likely to purchase a product from their preferred brand even though the competitor has better offers and discounts.

Final Thoughts

The CRM systems will become even more expensive in 2019 as the companies realize the significance of understanding their customers and not just knowing them. The technology that’s being used in CRM such as voice and mobile functionalities improves the customer experience as well as user experience.

The trends for 2019 are:

• Those that give access to CRM to use technology more efficiently and also integrating the technology.
• The CRM that is so evolved today and indeed it will become more in the future as CRM is becoming very important for companies.