What is the Future Like for CRM in 2023?

Carl Taylor | February 6, 2023

Using CRM has become the norm among businesses in various industries in the past year. After all, it’s a game-changer that makes scaling a business easier. But will things change this year?

Customer satisfaction.

It’s an important metric in business growth. After all, it helps you determine the customer’s receptiveness to your product or service. Not to mention their overall experience with your business. 

It goes without saying that you need to ensure your customers are highly satisfied with your business at all times.

See, reports showed that as many as 59% of customers will opt to leave a business after several bad experiences with them. Meanwhile, 17% will leave after just one bad customer experience.

There are also other benefits to ensuring customer satisfaction, one of which is its ability to become a major growth lever. When you have satisfied customers, they’ll likely stay loyal to you. And a 5% increase in customer retention can produce as much as a 25% increase in profit. 

Customer satisfaction also helps drive business and product decisions. This is because loyal customers can provide you with new ideas and insights to help you improve your product or service and make it more irresistible to your audience.

Ultimately, you can’t underestimate customer satisfaction even in 2023. It’s still one of the best drivers for business growth. This means that you should continue to focus on improving customer retention before you start expanding your offers to new customers. 

And an efficient customer relationship management (CRM) system will help with that. 

The right CRM will also help you identify how to stand out from your competitors by allowing you to deliver exceptional customer service. And as you know, satisfied customers will not only have a high CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) but also help you attract new customers. 

Needless to say, every successful business needs to put emphasis on customer satisfaction now and even in the years to come. So, it’s essential to pay close attention to your CRM if you want incredible growth for your business this 2023.

10 CRM Trends in 2023

It’s safe to assume that CRM will continue to grow and develop this year. Previously, it’s seen as a tool mainly just for measuring sales and customer engagement. But it will serve more functions for businesses this year.

With that, here are the 10 CRM trends to expect in 2023:

Trend #1. Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Operations

The era of sales, marketing, and operations departments having different goals and definitions is over. It’s because these three departments will find themselves working around common goals and definitions. 

This means they will start to coordinate their efforts to ensure that their teams meet the KPIs and short- and long-term objectives of a business. 

One of the benefits of this combined team effort is that it ensures that each area of the business contributes to the end goal. Since the departments will have common messaging and materials, they will also have the same revenue targets. 

The CRM platform will then serve as a tool for the departments to support customers at each point of the sales funnel. Expect each department to provide assistance to each other and, most importantly, to the customer. 

We will also see an increase in the usage of an “all-in-one” platform offering solutions for sales, marketing, web, service, and operations as a full CRM Suite. 

With this integrated setup, marketing will be more focused on catching the customers’ attention and providing extensive content. Sales will be in charge of the subject matter. Meanwhile, customer service will focus on providing people with information. 

Trend #2. Customer Retention

Retaining customers over a longer period will become the focus of the latest generation of CRM. 

It is expected that organisations will place just as much importance on keeping the customer as getting new ones. This is because the cost of changing from one provider to another will become very low for clients. 

RM will then be more focused on helping develop and provide highly personalised experiences. It’s because the traditional forced loyalty programs will no longer be an effective tool in retaining customers. 

We’ll also see more customer-oriented processes to help in increasing retention. 

To determine how you can make your CRM more focused on creating a customer-oriented process, there are 2 questions you should consider:

  • What actions can I take to keep my customers on board?
  • How do we view the vendor-customer relationship from the customer’s perspective?

The key point to remember is customers are more likely to stay loyal to your business if they know the business is all about them.

Trend #3. Mass Personalisation

Another key objective for the future of CRM is personalisation on a grander scale. 

Mass personalisation means making your products and services more customisable for your customers. This process will become possible when the customers are able to decide how they will interact with your business.

CRM will be vital in this area.

Now, it’s true that the technology we have today limits the degree of personalisation that customers can do. But advancements in science, analytics, and technology may soon allow business owners to overcome this challenge in the near future with their CRM.

This matters because mass personalisation has the potential to significantly transform the way things are done. 

For example, it may be possible to enter shopping stores and buy food in the supermarket through an app. Or auto-generate a shopping list based on a customer’s past buying habits, transactions, and consumption rates. 

Similarly, we may also see the development of GPS-like apps. These can be developed to help users navigate through a mall or a busy night market to purchase items. 

These apps will not only help customers save time and energy in the shopping experience but they will also change their behavior. 

And as a business owner, how you gather data and leverage it using your CRM will become an important factor in improving engagement with your customers. 

Trend #4. KPIs: Conversion Rate Optimisation and Higher Click-Through Rates

CRM KPIs will be more oriented toward measuring customer-oriented processes and the efficacy of the business model in the near future. And this means focusing on two particular KPIs: conversion rate optimization and click-through rates (CTR). 

Conversion rate optimisation measures how effectively you deliver your intended message to prospects. It also looks at how many prospects you could convert to customers. You can track this KPI through the sales data generated by your CRM.

On the other hand, the CTR identifies how successful online campaigns are. More specifically, it determines if the marketing message was compelling enough to entice customers to buy.

Trend #5. Intentional CRM Plans 

It is expected that companies will become more methodical and systematic in data gathering using CRM. Businesses will be able to forecast potential changes in their industry and client preferences by carefully examining the exceptions and outliers in their CRM data.

Trend #6. Mobilisation of CRM

 

Teams will have greater accessibility to the CRM system of a business. They will also be allowed to make updates regularly. 

This is because improved CRM mobile compatibility allows for the software to be both simple to set up and easy to use.

Trend #7. AI Functions

CRM will have AI functions to help detect and resolve any anomalies and data errors that can put your CRM data at risk. It will also significantly decrease manual data entry and centralise disparate databases. 

The AI functions of CRM will also help streamline internal and external processes and improve the customer’s experience. 

Also, they’ll be able to capture the complete customer lifecycle and provide employees with better tools and suggestions for managing work. These features can allow for better lead scoring to ensure prospects are ready to buy when they reach the latter half of the sales funnel.

When it comes to AI for CRM, the primary growth areas are predictive models, customer service, and lead management.

Trend #8. Authentic Connections 

As always, authentic connections help build trust and a strong relationship between the customers and a business. And CRM platforms have proven themselves to be essential in this area for sales and customer success teams.

We can expect CRMs to continue improving in this area. 

Since a CRM can monitor interactions and the effectiveness of CTAs in converting prospects, it will provide better insights to improve marketing campaigns. It will also improve personalised communications even at the individual level. 

Trend #9. CRM Integration

We are already beginning to see CRM providers become more ubiquitous. And they are starting to pour investment into their ecosystems. 

So, expect CRM to become a more well-rounded business platform that companies will use to manage their projects, process invoices, and all other business core functions. 

It will also continue to be customised by different service providers to suit specific cases and role-based capabilities. Not to mention allow integration to even more third-party systems.

Trend #10. Voice Technology

This will become a popular and powerful tool in CRM. The addition of a vocal or conversational layer to CRM will help businesses produce an entirely new user experience that’ll enable them to get more data from their customers.

Voice technology will also be used to enhance and improve customer experience. It’s because customers are expected to increase their usage of voice-enabled devices in doing certain tasks, such as product searches. 

In the same way, various departments of an organisation will use CRM’s voice technology in their tasks. This technology will help their sales staff track, notify, and update their teams about customer-oriented data. 

Meanwhile, the marketing team will have the ability to use voice technology to analyse the customer’s reaction to a campaign. They’ll be able to leverage voice technology to gain insight into the behaviour and preferences of customers. 

As for service representatives, they’ll get to input data on the go through voice. This will allow them to multitask better and provide more specific feedback on their customer interactions.

Prep Your CRM for 2023

This year, you can expect many changes to happen in terms of the functionality of CRM for businesses.

You now know what these upcoming trends are. This means you already have a head start in leveraging them in your business. So, make sure you can adapt early if you want to maintain an edge over your competitors.

Some of the things you need to keep a closer eye on are customer retention and the focus on authentic connections via CRM. You also have to consider the potential implications of AI and voice technology in engaging with your customers.

If you want to maximise the abilities of your CRM to ensure your business will be poised for growth this 2023, the Automation Agency Heroes can help. Feel free to contact us so we can set up and update your CRM the right way and put your business ahead of the pack.

 

About the author 

Carl Taylor

Carl Taylor is the Founder & CEO of Automation Agency. For the past 10 years Carl has been building businesses and marketing them online through the use of Sales Funnels, Email Marketing Automation, Landing Pages, and Wordpress Websites. Carl is also a #1 author and highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted thousands of businesses across various industries worldwide.

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