6 key CRM trends shaping growth in 2024

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.

CRM 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.

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