To understand where CRM is moving to and where innovation is going to come from in 2015 we must first understand where the discipline currently sits. It is worthwhile thinking about the present and future as having a picture of CRM evolution helps to set the scene for where we believe it is going to in its next iteration.
The present: A point of inflection
CRM has come of age. All brands are thinking harder about how CRM comes out of an internal function and stretches the customer focus across all aspects Bought, Owned and Earned media. How brands use disparate technologies to deliver a singular data driven deployment of customer communications is a hotly debated topic.
Big system integration players have connected the data dots. The Marketing Cloud services of Adobe and Oracle as well as the new kids on the block with the likes of SalesForce are starting to pose big questions to marketers: what is the right creative route, what are the best disparate or conjoined data technology solutions and equally as importantly how do I change my organisation to deal with this merging of platforms? Where CRM ‘lives’ within organisations is very much in question.
Social, both as a data source to enrich known data sets, as well as scaled distribution platform, has changed the way CRM can be delivered. Mobile has further aided the choices available to deliver a consumer message.
What CRM actually is has been thrown into question by the rise in cloud creative services, connected data and a blurring of the line between customer marketing and the customer having the power to engage with a brand on their terms. As such we believe that CRM is in a point of inflection as a discipline and that the direction it will take will vary by each organisation.
The future: Shaking the label
The future of CRM is an incredibly exciting place. Brands will have realised the benefit of having CRM at the heart of their digital communications strategy and ultimately known and unknown customer profiling will drive all communications that are outbound to the brands consumers.
No longer will CRM sit as a siloed discipline, either from client side organisational structures or from within the way that the technology operates. The days of email marketing as a single lens distribution model of customer communication will disappear and universal ID’s will replace the historical profiling that brands messaged to. Cookie based derived digital communication will have eroded and brands will be able to utilise the known consumer behaviour from POS, Mobile, Desktop and genuinely realise the technology benefits to market to a segment of one.
CRM wont be seen or referred to as a single discipline, digital or otherwise. We believe that the pace of evolution around singular view customer data will bleed through all parts of the technology solutions that brands deploy; as a single stack or as a collection of point based options. Data enrichment from 2nd and 3rd party sources will fuse to customer ID’s which will then give a more holistic and relevant of the consumer, not just the data that the brand holds. As such the label of CRM will start to shake off at it becomes much more than what it used to be.
CRM will just become part of content distribution. Its an archetypal craft that, whilst still employed, will cease to be as an individual ‘thing’. Brands starting the customer connection strategy with a rounded, data driven model of the consumer will become standard, not something that is done in isolation to the rest of the organisations communications efforts.
The art of CRM creative will be delivered through a scientific backbone. The consumer will effectively become their own unwitting creative agency through behaviours they have undertaken online and offline. Cloud asset deployment suites will enable the actual delivery of real-time custom creative across all channels and this will stop becoming exceptional and now be the standard.
CRM will stop being CRM and become part of the fabric of a brand’s content play. The content will be highly relevant to the individual, distributed to the right person on the right device with the messaging being derived by them, for them.
Our prediction of the future of CRM is available today. The technology is ready to go, the skillsets exist in brands or with their partners and the advent of social and mobile already offers scaled, relevant modes of communication alongside that bedfellow of email. The barrier to this coming together is the organisational thread that brands need to weave internally – that thread is the consumer. It starts and ends with the individual and the closer brands get to aligning their organisational design around that singular most important factor the faster the realisation of future-facing CRM, or in our view, content distribution, can be taken advantage of.
By Matt Adams, Chief Media Officer at iProspect.
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