Customer relationship management (CRM) is at the heart of every business. It’s a significant spend of $500,000 to $5 million a year for most companies. CRM is not about making your front office more productive anymore. It’s a technology that supports customers throughout their end-to-end journeys. It drives customer relationships, their retention, and, ultimately, revenue.

Now, CRM has finally broken out from its organizational silos to become a broad company mandate. Today, many companies report the progress of CRM projects to Wall Street, and C-suite executives rely on the success of these programs to advance their careers. This new purpose expands CRM’s remit and serves as a driver to transform CRM technology. How?

  • CRM becomes more powerful as it aims to support all things customer. CRM consolidates the sales tech, marketing tech, and customer service tech point product ecosystem. It coalesces with digital experience platforms into composable customer engagement ecosystems to support digital and human-assisted customer journeys. CRM bleeds into the middle office and into core contact center operations. It encroaches on the traditional span of human capital management solutions. And it becomes embedded into workplace apps, such as collaboration tools, and allows non-customer-facing employees to align around and orchestrate actions that benefit the customer.
  • CRM technology will recommend ideal organizational constructs. It captures the context in which work is done and its outcomes. Insights can be used to dynamically assemble the right teams based on skill and performance and, in the future, even recommend formal organizational hierarchies, roles, and responsibilities that drive peak performance.
  • CRM will underpin front-office employee success. CRM will train users and unlock new career paths. It does this by tracing user actions and identifying next best actions for coaching and learning. Onboarding workflows will unlock more advanced functionality as novice users gain competency; users will unlock new training paths to uplevel their skills and open opportunities for advancement. CRM captures every user action, allowing performance management to become in the moment and continuous — and able to match performance outcomes to employee incentive programs and even, in the future, compensation.

Read our report on The Future Of CRM to understand the power of modern CRM. And let’s connect if you want to talk to me about your point of view on how CRM is evolving. Please reach out to inquiry@forrester.com to get a conversation scheduled.