Expert: Chris Fletcher
CRM technology is fundamental to the customer experience. Expectations for CRM implementations are high, and time frames for deployments and ongoing enhancements are condensed.
As CRM continues to rapidly evolve, deploying, supporting, integrating and orchestrating the technologies that underpin successful CRM initiatives will become increasingly rewarding and challenging for technical professionals.
Opportunities and Challenges
- Expectations for CRM implementations are high, and time frames for deployments and ongoing enhancements are condensed. This challenge is acute in Internet of Things (IoT) and digital business initiatives where CRM is critical for customer interaction and support.
- A majority of new CRM deployments are now cloud-based. When combined with adjacent cloud and on-premises infrastructures in the enterprise, the result is a fragmented environment that creates challenges for governance, data protection, identify management and integration.
- Digital marketing analytics is a critical source of customer insight, driving personalization and product recommendations. Organizations that cannot effectively integrate their multiple online and offline data sources will create business intelligence (BI) silos and lose opportunities.
- Leading CRM and customer experience vendors include cloud-native companies like Salesforce, mature software conglomerates like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, and focused contenders like Adobe. They are complemented by hundreds of smaller vendors delivering point solutions in the many-faceted CRM and customer experience market. Technical professionals will contend with a diverse and complex vendor landscape for the near future.
What You Need to Know
- Seventy-five percent of CRM applications are not deployed enterprisewide. Integration and interoperability between multiple architectures, applications and vendors are mandatory.
- CRM will become an integral component of IoT and digital business initiatives. In a Gartner survey, 45% of enterprises that had begun or completed IoT projects identified CRM as the enterprise application that would be most significantly impacted by IoT initiatives.
- API-centric integration (aka "headless applications") and agile development for CRM are both high-interest topics in the developer community. API-centric applications are valuable assets to leverage, but they can also add a level of complexity or require resources and skills beyond what some organizations can provide.
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