Industry Forecasting
Forecasting the Future of Customer Relationship Management Software
Of the many types of software used for managing the many interactions between companies and their customers, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications are the most dominant (Shang, Lin, 2010). It is because these applications are designed to match how people work together to sell customers on solutions and serve them over the lifetime of their using products and services
(Rapp, Trainor, Agnihotri, 2010). CRM systems are used in all sizes and varieties of business, as this type of software makes it possible to stay in touch with existing customers more efficiently while also searching out new prospects to increase sales.
Major Trends Influencing CRM Today
CRM software applications have traditionally been organized into functional areas that corresponded to how companies managed their sales, marketing, product management, pricing and services organizations. This is changing drastically as CRM applications today are being created to match the business process workflows companies have, including what the specific needs are of people in organizations for customer-specific data (Shang, Lin, 2010). This focus on the processes that unify departments vs. just the functional areas has also given way to more of a focus on using analytics to plan, execute, monitor and evaluate the success or failure of strategies or not (Rapp, Trainor, Agnihotri, 2010). The combining of the process-centric focus to managing organizational strategies to serve customers with analytics is bringing a new era of accountability to every strategy that contributes to gaining new sales and keeping existing customers. Analytics are also being increasingly used to measure the levels of CRM strategy performance over time, including how effective the CRM system is itself in creating profitable customers for life (Ranjan, Bhatnagar, 2008). Analytics that measure the performance of individualized processes are also redefining how CRM systems are designed and used.
At the foundational or platform level of CRM, there is significant change including the adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which is the delivery of applications over the Web (Lashar, 2009). This is re-ordering the pricing and service level agreements of CRM applications and continues to lead to higher levels of CRM application adoption and use. The best-known companies who are selling CRM systems today on the SaaS platform include Salesforce.com, today a $1B company, RightNow Technologies and SugarCRM both of which are growing at an average of 7% to 10% a year in revenue and new subscribers (Tsai, 2010).
How Trends Today Will Reshape the Market Tomorrow
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