Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) is the set of business processes and activities aimed at managing relationships with the customer portfolio in order to acquire, maintain and increase their value.

In 2019 alone, companies that invested in the use of a CRM went from 56% to 74%.
It seems to be a must in any company that has more than 10 employees especially when combined with customer care service.
So the question arises, what will be the future evolutions of this tool? What are the trends of the most used platforms?

An inContact study revealed that 67% of customers prefer to make do, even by following FAQs or guides, rather than talking to customer support. Well this is a real scoop! For years there has been a long discussion about how important it was to help the user during the decision-making process and now we discover that this is not the case. In reality it is a predictable evolution.
People have a higher digitalization and culture than in the past and therefore are more familiar with contact processes or online purchases.

So offer self-service tools on your site. Here are some useful tips:

1. Add a knowledge base section to your site that contains information for solving the most common problems. To communicate this information more effectively, use simple, short sentences and add explanatory videos and images.
2. Guide the user to buy the right product. For example, use tests that can help him identify the items that best suit his needs. Go further! Offer free training opportunities, such as video courses, live courses or webinars to familiarize yourself with your products and services.
3. Integrate online quote / price calculation systems through integration with your CRM or ERP. In this way, the user can create a personalized, fast and at the same time accurate offer by himself. In this case, it is also very useful to create automatic discount procedures, such as in the event of a subscription or purchase within a certain day of creating the offer.

We can say that artificial intelligence is no longer a novelty. AI tool integrations are estimated to exceed 257% over the next two years.
It’s not about replacing customer service agents, but about helping them by automating repetitive tasks and providing insights into customer behaviors.
So let’s see how you could exploit it in your business.

Basic assistance
Artificial intelligence can be an opportunity to improve productivity especially in the case of repetitive activities. Let’s take the example of chatbots based on artificial intelligence. They are used to answer basic customer questions.
They can even recommend the right products to customers based on the data they have already collected thanks to the direct integration to CRM.
More importantly, AI chatbots increase the quality of customer service. Regardless of the complexity of a service request or a customer’s time zone, they will provide instant feedback 24/7.

Voice assistance
In the future, chatbots could start using natural language processing when interacting with the customer. Already several companies are experimenting with solutions that use deep neural networks to create a conversational ability, capable of understanding spoken requests and providing an automatic relevant response. Creating a voice-enabled bot is the future of CRM evolution. They will provide your customers with accurate and real-time information, with no waiting times.

Predictive analytics
Artificial intelligence helps customer service agents respond promptly to customer requests by providing real-time information on each customer’s purchase history, navigation patterns, previous customer requests, needs, location, etc.
Many VoIP call centers already use artificial intelligence to analyze customer sentiment and engagement.

Remember that customers increasingly expect brands to deliver relevant and personalized experiences.
According to statistics, 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a company that offers highly personalized brand experiences. Plus, they have zero tolerance for uniform content.

To improve your customer experience strategy, you must therefore invest in hyper-personalization.
Although personalization often uses unstructured customer data, such as their location or previous purchases, hyper-personalization provides more detailed customer information. CRM, integrating with most service, sales and marketing tools, centralizes multi-channel customer data in one place.

Social networks are the center of customer relationship management. They help you connect with your customers in real time and improve brand awareness.
You may have already received direct messages, mentions or requests via Whatsapp and monitoring multiple channels could make you waste a lot of time.
The solution could be to integrate CRM with social networks. They also provide analytics and metrics in a single dashboard.

In 2020, the number of smartphone users exceeded 3.5 billion.
Mobile technologies have changed habits. Now customers expect real-time information from any channel, location and device.

By investing in mobile CRM technologies, you will deliver seamless experiences across all internet-enabled mobile devices.
You will enable sales, marketing and service teams to access and manage customer information in real time, regardless of their location. In this moment when so many companies are in smart working it could really prove to be a winning solution!