Five CRM Trends for 2007

Hey, want to save a lot of time investigating CRM systems? Want to know what's creating competitive advantage in customer strategies? You could ask me. Or you could go to this link and check out what Search CRM thinks. (Or, you could do that, and then ask me whether I agree.) Here's the top-of-mind summary from the link, but check out the link to explore more:

1. Top 15 CRM vendors, emerging trends revealed: ISM released its annual rankings of the top vendors for small and midsized business (SMB) and enterprise CRM in March, and while the names are familiar, the market is seeing change. According to the report by the Bethesda, Md.-based consultancy, analytical tools, mobile offerings and Software as a Service (SaaS) trends are driving changes.
2. CRM software rankings tell a familiar tale: Siebel and SAP remain the leading enterprise CRM products, but midmarket players like Salesforce.com, RightNow and Microsoft are gaining ground, Forrester Research found in a February report. The firm predicts the market for CRM software and services will reach $10.9 billion by 2010, up from $8.4 billion this year.

3. Gartner ranks customer service software: Gartner's April Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers found a fragmented marketplace. Only Siebel made the leader's quadrant, while Microsoft and Salesforce.com were named as visionaries. There still isn't one vendor that has created a full suite for customer service needs.

4. Is SAP losing the CRM usability race?: At last year's Sapphire conference, SAP announced a revamped user interface, but it is still not widely available. Meanwhile, CRM competitors continue to focus on usability. SAP's CRM roadmap is still not clear to many users.

5. Improving the customer experience: Call centers making an emotional connection: An increasing focus on the customer experience is driving call centers to improve customer satisfaction by identifying and measuring customer emotions. Call center agent training and carefully crafted customer surveys can improve the emotional connection with customers, but the business and corresponding technology is still in its infancy.

I'd like to comment at least on Number 5. The biggest challenge for any company moving forward will be coming up with an integrated way to measure, monitor and improve their customers' perceptions of the company's brand. Analytics in CRM are big, but naturally their being driven by sales and/or decision support. They are not being used as effectively or comprehensively in true voice of the customer (VOC) initiatives.

I'm not depressed about this lack of tools and enterprise commitment to what is essentially the core function of a business, viz., to create and improve a relevant, profitable and sustainable value proposition -- using facts. First, it means a lot more work for me.

Second, my clients only have to do a little bit of this kind of work (customer strategy development, VOC initiatives including customer satisfaction programs, market research) to be incredibly successful. To say that customer analytics is a growth area is to say that early adopters can get a big lead. If you can create a great customer experience by aligning people, process, technology, communications and social network conversations, you're going to win, because so few companies have figured out the power of these tools and approaches. It's the Wild West, baby ... tighten your saddle and pull down your hat.