CRM in the age of the customer

Trends for the coming year

When putting the finishing touches on your CRM strategy, don't forget the following trends that will impact the market over the next 12 months:

♦ Untamed processes are getting more attention. More organizations will move away from isolated BPM and/ or front-office CRM projects and toward cross-functional transformation initiatives to support the invisible and untamed customer management processes critical to exceptional customer experiences.

♦ Agile implementation approaches are scaling to the enterprise level. More organizations will adopt agile project management and software development methodologies. Agile development is based on principles of iterative development, where requirements evolve through collaboration within a self-organizing, cross-functional team.

♦ Social customer engagement is moving to the mainstream. Social CRM use cases spotlighting demonstrable business value will become more common. The key to value-added social customer engagement is to be clear about your objectives.

♦ Mobile apps are empowering employees and customers. Mobile CRM solution support will continue to evolve rapidly, but assembling the components of an effective mobile CRM solution to meet the precise use case for a specific type of mobile worker requires navigating a complex set of decisions.

♦ The marketing technology office is driving customer engagement innovation. Organizations will invest even more in harnessing marketing technologies to spur customer interaction innovation.

♦ The customer analytics ecosystem is increasing in complexity. Forrester anticipates that enterprises will increase their focus on data-driven marketing. But few firms have the budget, technology capabilities or analytical skills to advance their analytics agendas internally, and will frequently turn to extended analytics ecosystems for guidance.

♦ Organizations are adopting flexible CRM management practices. More enterprises will embrace emerging CRM solution governance best practices to better capitalize on the value of on-demand solutions.

♦ Customer experience disciplines are cutting costs and boosting profits. Forrester expects that organizations will start to adopt a more disciplined approach to transformation and start doing business in a new, more customer-centric way.

♦ Voice of the customer programs are driving action and defining results. More organizations will adopt best practices, which will help organizations determine process improvement priorities and enable back-office employees to better understand customer expectations.