CRM continues to be a hot investment area for enterprises. Our data shows that close to 70% of organizations plan to increase their CRM investments over the next year. Why? Because CRM is at the heart of all customer operations that directly impact company revenue, and emerging technologies are boosting its power. These technologies provide deeper insights, automate tasks, and enhance personalization, making the front office vastly more effective.
But adopting emerging tech is tricky. Often, the appetite for emerging tech outweighs its true, realized benefit. Enterprises also find real impact in small proofs of concept but then struggle to scale investments across organizations.
Our report, The Top Emerging Technologies For CRM, 2024, explores the impact of emerging technologies within three benefit horizons: short-, medium-, and longer-term.
Three technologies are poised to deliver ROI in the near term.
Generative AI (genAI) for language, genAI for visual content, and TuringBots deliver real value right now. GenAI yields material benefits by empowering CRM users to reach new levels of productivity, to deliver a differentiated customer experience (CX), and to unlock new revenue streams. TuringBots speed the development of bespoke CRM applications, which accelerates innovation by allowing companies to iterate on user and customer experiences more quickly.
Companies with advanced tech management strategies are already partway through a rollout or deep into pilots of these technologies. Even less technically mature companies are running pilots. You should be exploring or investing in them now.
The promise of automating CRM actions dominates medium-term tech hopes.
Medium-term (2–5 years out) emerging technologies focus on automating actions within CRM. AI agents automate customer-facing engagement such as sales prospecting or answering simple customer service inquiries. Explainable AI enables the front office to trust and act on “next best” recommendations, steps, and insights.
It will be several years, however, before these technologies produce a significant benefit for most companies. Companies with advanced tech management strategies should be deep into piloting these technologies, while less mature firms should approach them with more caution.
Two technologies present long-term potential for risk-takers.
Web3 and extended reality have niche use cases today: Web3 CRM finds traction in industries such as nonfungible-token marketplaces and decentralized finance. Extended reality, used today for field worker training, onboarding, and field repairs, will have broader appeal for customer service and in select industries such as healthcare. Put these technologies on your watch list.
Read our report on these technologies and let me know your thoughts. You can connect with me via inquiry or brief me about your technologies and customer success stories.
