PRODUCT-LED GROWTH
6 key CRM trends shaping growth in 2024
Published April 17th, 2024
10 min read
Your customers' expectations may be changing as fast as technology. But the need to really understand those same customers never changes. If you don’t understand what makes them tick, gaining traction or achieving product-market fit will always be a hard road to navigate. Customer centricity is the solution. With that as your north star and guided by the latest CRM trends, growth in 2024 is closer than you think.
Di Mace
Director, Content & Communications
Table of Contents
In the last 30 years or so, customer relationship management has come a long way – transforming from a simple contact database, to the essential information source for your entire customer journey. Because of that, CRMs are now a non-negotiable tool for every growing business.
As the nerve center that contains all the relationship intelligence about your customers, your CRM also carries the personal timeline of their interest and action. And the near-future is filled with even more CRM tools to help you map and manage that journey.
Latest CRM trends you need to track
In 2010, the creator of modern-day direct marketing (the precursor to customer relationship management), Lester Wunderman, was still spouting pearls of wisdom (at age 90), “We’re in the death-knell of one-way conversations and the birth of the dialog system of marketing. The secret of the future is to listen to the customer, not to talk to him.”
His 10+ year-old words, epitomize the coming CRM trends that are shaping growth.
CRM TREND 1: Voice, conversational UI and self-service CRM
Thanks to Siri and Alexa, voice assistants aren't really new – some CRMs are already utilizing them. A recent report by Statistica predicted that the number of voice assistants would reach 8.4B units by the mid 2020s. This trend is likely to rapidly expand, with CRM capabilities extending to include the recording of voice meetings, creating transcripts and identifying topics or words that have a specific meaning.
Currently, chatbots mainly aid customer service efforts, however, we’re slowly starting to see chatbots moving from text to voice. In the coming years, chatbots will use Natural Language Processes (NLP) and conversational capabilities to comprehend customer inquiries and provide an appropriate response.
Self-service chatbots already utilize AI (see trend #2). With a CRM in place, self-servicing systems can predict customer requests and needs, look up existing customer information and answer questions much quicker than their human counterparts. This enhancement saves time and optimizes sales resources for more valuable engagement.
Likely future customer relationship management trends include tracking comments, likes and shares in a central place, providing insights into long-term social media trends (see trend # 4) and behavioral patterns of customers.
They’ll also recognize when an answer doesn't satisfy the customer and seamlessly move them to a live salesperson.
CRM TREND 2: Smarter CRM through AI, ML and IoT
In this second customer relationship management trend, CRM technology is more tightly integrated with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT). The rise of predictive analytics adds unprecedented power to the data collected, while also making it easier for businesses to understand their customers and predict future buying trends.
AI is already appearing in business intelligence, automation and APIs as well as conversational user interfaces (UI) and self-service (see trend #1). In B2B, it's mainly used in communication automations and building data-driven business models that rely on CRM systems. AI-driven chatbots and automations, reduce the time spent on manual tasks like automatically delivering leads and data directly to sales and marketing.
AI-powered CRM is able to analyze, summarize, predict, recommend and cross-sell/up-sell based on the customer’s historical data. One of the biggest benefits of this customer relationship management trend is the removal of a huge burden of manual tasks – with both AI and machine learning (ML) having a huge capacity to do tedious, time-consuming tasks.
CRM systems will also connect to IoT feeds – from smart home devices, electronic white goods, wearable health monitors and security scanners. IoT integrated CRM technology can provide insights on customer behavior, proactively detect product issues before a customer does, and automatically create a support ticket for your team to address as soon as possible.
Curious about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms?
Find out what they are, their history and the market size of this fast growing segment.
CRM TREND 3: Hyper-personalization through CRM data
In the years ahead, a critical customer relationship management trend is to build an even more personalized experience. According to a 2021 McKinsey study, “Consumers don’t just want personalization, they demand it.” Over seven in ten of those surveyed expect personalization and get frustrated when businesses don’t bother. A similarly high proportion expect relevant and tailored communication, while over half expect a positive onboarding experience, and want the company to celebrate their achievements, follow-up, and send recommendations.
Personalization has been a long-standing core tenet of customer relationship management.
Companies risk revenue and reputation if they’re not already satisfying the demands for personalization, let alone rising to the next level challenge. The McKinsey report also noted that companies who excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue than non-personalization practitioners – ensuring the effort put into knowing your customers delivers a high return on the investment.
Responding to the higher demands of customers is now possible through the intelligent, real-time capabilities of AI (see trend #2).
However, the customer experience must be hyper-personal to each customer, especially when they’re engaging with an automated sales and ordering system. As an example, every homepage that Amazon creates is unique to each customer, depending on that customer’s shopping, wish lists, browsing, and many other data points.
Part of the challenge ahead is to interpret customer data in the correct context, a hurdle that artificial intelligence and natural language processing (see trend #2) can help to overcome.
WYSIWYG HTML text editor essentials for personalized CRM communications
A WYSIWYG editor includes easy to use, feature-rich options that enhance users ability to personalize communication and enhance deeper engagement:
- Clean, modern interface: a sleek intuitive UI that speeds work
- Clean, accurate copy-paste: content from Word, Excel, or GDocs that replicates its source, without breaking the underlying code or needing developer bug-fixes
- Add an AI-powered text editor with pre-written prompts, to your app
- Ability to limit toolbar options: able to hide or disable options like HTML editing, font formatting, and font sizes to prevent straying from the default style formats defined
- Compliance checking: if accessibility is imperative for compliance, ensure your editor automatically spots and suggests fixes for issues before the document’s published
- Multi-language spell checking compatibility: the ability to add your product and brand terms to ensure all content creators spell and capitalize them correctly
- Templates: reusable, predesigned templates with your brand styles so that users can easily insert, edit and publish documents
- Easily pull styling and formatting: take formatting from another paragraph, document, or page and apply it to your selected text.
CRM TREND 4: Mobile CRM and social CRM explodes
The world’s workforce is becoming increasingly remote. So having a CRM experience that’s widely accessible on different devices, is essential for them to maximize their knowledge work capacity.
Mobile CRM is the ability to use CRM features from any mobile device and provides even more freedom and flexibility to work, regardless of your location. Universal apps and components that work seamlessly across platforms, operating systems, and screen sizes let sales and marketing professionals be more productive without being tied to their desk.
The realm of social CRM is the most anticipated customer relationship management trend in the CRM industry – where businesses gain valuable customer insights from the data made available on social media. Recent studies have shown that social media data analysis can measure brand reputation, reveal beneficial brand partnerships, and discover shifting market structures in a way that wasn’t previously possible.
Therefore, leading CRM systems will go beyond simple integrations for social media and transform themselves into social CRM. Social media sales and service processes will be an integral part of each step of the buyer’s journey, the sales funnel, relationship building, and customer service – leveraging them all to create better customer relationships.
WYSIWYG HTML text editor essentials for mobile CRM and social CRM
Both the Mobile CRM and Social CRM trends rely on anywhere, any time access to information, so your customer relationship management software needs to include a text editing component that's optimized for mobile devices. It must:
- Automatically adjust to different size screens and devices
- Work across multiple popular web browsers without breaking the HTML
- Output HTML that’s consistent, despite the different ways users type and format text inside the editor
- Support social messaging
- Ability to respond to customers on the move, in real-time and track it within the CRM
Get started with TinyMCE for CRM
Start building using our CRM editor starter config and a free 14-day trial.
Or see a demo and talk to an expert
Explore TinyMCE for CRMCRM TREND 5: Industry specific and channel-less CRM
There are plenty of industry-specific CRM solutions that boast specialized features to help companies remain competitive in their niche. With some industries (real estate, manufacturing, hospitality, insurance, construction) already having an industry-specific CRM, this trend is expected to go viral in coming years.
In contrast to omnichannel CRM, which involves meeting customers in all the channels they use, a channel-less CRM approach puts less focus on communication channels. In a channel-less CRM strategy, your customers are at the center of CRM processes, from start to finish. To support this, its expected CRM tools will integrate AI (see trend #2) that aids more intensive customer data gathering.
CRM TREND 6: Whole-of-customer experience
Lester Wunderman also had thoughts on this topic: “Your share of loyal customers, not your share of market, creates profits. Spend more on the good customers you have.”
The sixth customer relationship management trend encompasses closer internal alignment and the shared use of tools – especially between sales and marketing – to better focus your sales efforts.
CRMs are also rapidly moving towards the support of an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) go-to-market (GTM) strategy. This GTM approach aligns sales and marketing teams around a set of strategically defined target accounts, and each account is treated as a market in its own right.
When the same CRM platform and strategies are used across sales and marketing, touch points are centralized, key business intelligence is accessible and it’s easier to focus on the right leads, instead of more leads. Sales teams performing Account-based Selling (ABS) can rapidly create accurate buyer personas through a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and significantly augment the customer analysis capabilities of regular CRM systems.
The selected accounts represent significant higher growth opportunities and using the CRM, account-based communications are personalized according to the customer’s current initiatives, challenges and activities. Decision-makers can also utilize the CDP to obtain a more comprehensive data set for calculating customer lifetime value, acquisition costs, and other key metrics.
In this trend, the synthesis of CRM and CDP transforms the sales funnel from a rollercoaster, to a lift, where customers are personally journeyed through the funnel toward greater expansion and growth.
What’s a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) integrate all available customer touchpoints, interactions, and other relevant data – representing a significant advancement for CRM practices.
What's an Account-based marketing strategy?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic B2B approach where you target a select group of best-fit accounts that represent significant higher growth opportunities. The 2020 Gartner Technology Marketing Benchmarks Survey observed increases in key marketing and sales areas after implementing ABM.
The future of CRM
These six CRM trends represent the latest growth opportunities in the CRM landscape, and highlight the importance of evolving your CRM strategies, as technology changes. The unifying theme is deeper AI integration for hyper-personalization, voice and conversational interfaces, and enhanced customer service.
1. Hyperautomation
2. No-code and low-code apps
3. AI, robotics and machine learning
4. Personalization
5. Ease of cross-stack integrations
6. Automation-as-a-Service (AaaS)
Companies looking to harness the power of their customer relationships, should adopt CRM strategies that align with the types (and expectations) of the customers they have, as well as the type of customers they want to gain
author
Di Mace
Director, Content & Communications
Messaging strategist and copywriter whose passion lies in working with brands like Tiny, that have deep-seated values and embrace the power of their story. She gets a kick out of solving problems, loves learning new things and making stuff, every day. When she’s not thinking through clever copy lines or clarifying value propositions, she’s knitting amazing socks for everyone she knows.
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