siliconindia | | December 20189Overall, we can simply say the relevance of CRM in today's connected world is only increasing. Both organisations and customers feel that it is an essential tool for themgood data hygiene by all the stakehold-ers is mandatory, collating data being stored in watertight compartments by different departments is also becoming essential. This may be an arduous task due to various formats and differen-tiated systems being used across the same organisation, but this is a chal-lenge that needs to be climbed sooner rather than later. Latest innovations in technologies like voice commands, availability of offline modes for hand-held devices, social network data min-ing will further assist in reaching the desired state. With the rising usage of big data analytics & predictive model-ling, the utility of this data is no longer a question mark!IntegrationsWhile some of the vendors are toiling over building integrated applications (e.g., Oracle has combined sales & service in its engagement cloud), in my opinion an open platform which eases integrations with the applica-tions of choice is the road to future. The future CRM systems need to com-municate with other systems, which could be native integrations, custom integrations or third-party integrations. Seamless & effortless integration with ease of data movement is the winning recipe for any of the cloud CRMs of future. This allows organisations to re-main agile, nimble and ready for any unforeseen future challenges.Augmented RealityWhile Virtual Reality failed to make a big impact in the CRM world, Aug-mented Reality (AR) is ready to re-move that tag. AR may not be as glitzy as its cousin VR, but the cases of us-age are much more practical and user friendly. Its usage in retail sales, enter-prise training and other such scenarios lead us to believe that its growth will be exponential as AR is just not cool it is useful too!Omnichannel & IoTOmnichannel deserves to be in this watchlist at least this year more as I believe it has still not reached its full potential. It will continue to grow as customers get more & more connected and have access to multiple platforms simultaneously to educate them, as well as to guide them towards their preferred choices. It may eventually become an absorbed feature of all the CRMs in next couple of years, though as one cannot imagine a CRM system that is not available in an integrated fashion through all the channels.IoT or Internet of Things is also one of the channels through which data is collated and analysed. IoT data allows a service provider to provide superior & optimized service. The behaviour patterns observed and analysed using IoT are correlated with other available data to provide meaningful informa-tion to the service provider. The num-ber of IoT-enabled devices surpassed the human population a few years ago and its usage is certainly not set to dwindle yet.ChatbotsChatbots have perhaps been the big-gest disappointment of this year when the experience of customer service us-ing these have not really delivered big results. However, I continue to believe they are the right tools for future. My confidence gets boosted when I get exposed to all the research happen-ing in Natural Language processing and strides being made in the fields of Machine Learning & Artificial Intelli-gence. The business case for chatbots in guided selling, customer service, loan processing, recruitment and oth-ers are a way too strong to discard this technical innovation. A combination of intelligent chatbots with the right of human intervention to take care of human emotions & empathy are the re-sponse to catering to multiple custom-ers at the same time without getting a blow to customer satisfaction.Overall, we can simply say the rel-evance of CRM in today's connected world is only increasing. Both organi-sations and customers feel that it is an essential tool for them. Mushrooming CRM providers either armed with a technological advancement and/or industry-specific solution is the testi-mony to the golden future of CRM. A CRM solution may change its avatar yet again, and in a manner which none of us can foresee as of now.However, moving from a tradi-tional CRM system to a modern CRM can be expensive and risky, especially in the dynamic world of CRM, where we are not sure which of the innova-tions might be feasible for a particular organisation. That is the reason why a lot of reputed service providers are of-fering Fixed Scope Offerings or Speed Solutions to their customers. The cus-tomers have a choice to pilot with the core functionalities of the CRM appli-cation of their choice. Gradually they can expand and transform post evaluat-ing the ROI of the application basis the pilot. This approach is certainly getting popular as it mitigates the risk, as well as limits the cost involved while mak-ing such an important decision for the future of an organisation.
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