Did you know that 90% of businesses who have 10 or more employees use some form of customer relationship management system? Yes you read that right. Customer relationship management systems have graduated from a tool for sending emails to customers at different stages of buyers journey to becoming an essential cog in the wheel of your revenue generating machine.

 

It is now helping businesses capitalize on untapped opportunities in it new year resolutions markets that they have not explored in the past. These systems can help you extract actionable insights from large customer data sets and deliver product and services customers want. How will the customer relationship management industry evolve in 2024? That is the question we would try to answer in this article.

 

In this article, you will learn about seven customer relationship management trends you should keep an eye on in 2024.

7 Customer Relationship Management Trends You Should Keep An Eye On In 2024

Here are seven customer relationship management trends you can not afford to ignore in 2024.

Dominance of Generative AI

From transcribing and summarizing customer calls to creating marketing materials, generative AI is doing the heavy lifting for marketing and sales professionals. By automating and taking care of all the mundane tasks,  Generative AI is playing a crucial role in automating operational workflow. Artificial intelligence powered analytics can help you identify patterns and respond to changes in customer behavior and preferences in a more efficient manner.

 

Large language models enable both customers and employees to communicate with these generative AI tools through natural language, which makes them more accessible. You can ask questions that can help you unearth aspects of customer’s behavior that you might have neglected.

Industry Centric CRM Goes Mainstream

Verticalization of customer relationship management software will be the biggest trend for 2024. Instead of offering generic solutions, more and more CRM vendors will offer industry centric customer relationship management solutions. SalesForce has already started offering these industry specific solutions for different industries and expects other players in the market to follow suit.

 

What really makes these industry specific customer relationship management solutions stand out is that they come pre packages with all the data models, workflows and connectors to other relevant applications. This makes implementing these customer relationship management solutions much easier as compared to traditional customer relationship management solutions. Best of all, they also come with compliance infrastructure which will help you ensure compliance with industry specific regulations.

Business Value Tops The CRM Deployment Agendas

Customer relationship management software is expensive and businesses have spent millions of dollars on buying these solutions. 2024 will be the year when they will ask about the business value of these solutions. Is the expensive licenses for CRM software your business have bought in the past really delivering the business value it supposed to? If the answer is no, then you must look for ways to extract better value out of these customer relationship management solutions.

 

Expect more enterprises to critically analyze their customer relationship management tool usage, map it to business outcomes and compare it with industry benchmarks. They will try to either get rid of unused licenses or find different use cases for it in 2024. The focus will shift towards optimizations and extracting more revenue from existing customer relationship management solutions without incurring additional costs.

Vendor Platform Consolidation

A vast majority of large scale enterprises are using multiple customer relationship solutions from different vendors. For instance, their marketing team will be using HubSpot, their sales team would be using SalesForce while their customer support team might be using ZenDeek.

 

This means that every team has its own perception of the customers. This fragmentation prevents organizations from getting a unified and holistic view of the customer. By consolidating vendor platforms, businesses can get better visibility into customers and can manage the customer across the entire lifecycle from first interaction to the last interaction.

Centralized Data Strategy

By implementing a centralized data strategy, businesses can get a consolidated view of customers. With a unified view of a customer snapshot, businesses can adopt a content delivery platform that can collect and aggregate data from different customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning solutions as well as data from many different sources such as email, social media and more. This will provide businesses with an opportunity to paint a clear picture about their customer.

Customized Spending On Customer Relationship Management Will Grow

With IT budgets predicted to remain stable or even shrink in 2024, more and more businesses will opt for buying specific components instead of a full customer relationship management solution. They want to pay for only what they will use to reduce their costs. This trend will also be reflected in cloud spending and cheap dedicated servers purchases. 

 

A major chunk of IT budgets will go towards buying components of tools instead of purchasing the complete solution. Expect businesses to be more conscious about the features that will benefit their business and components that will solve their biggest pain points instead of the entire software package.

Rise of No Code and Low Code Development Tools

The demand for personalized solutions have forced customer relationship solution providers to integrate low code and no code development tools. This has enabled businesses in creating their own customized workflows and experiences. 

 

Now, businesses won’t need to involve the IT department to create custom workflows, even a data analyst who doesn’t know much about app development can develop tailor made workflows and applications to serve specific business needs. Organizations leveraging those no code and low code development tools in customer relationship management solutions must enforce stringent policies and guardrails to develop secure and compliance applications. 

 

Which customer relationship management trend will create the biggest splash in 2024? Share it with us in the comments section below.