What will CRM look like in 5 years? Some thought leaders, such as Ray Wang in Software Advice’s blog post CRM’s Next 5 in 5, have put forth the suggestion that context services will provide a more detailed view of customers. I agree with the prediction, and suggest that in the next five years, we will see businesses more fully merge customer engagement with market research techniques by leveraging solutions that integrate survey and social data, such as text / sentiment analytics, with customer relationship management platforms.
Businesses will be able to collect customer feedback from multiple listening posts and customer touch points, such as call centers, social media platforms and emails, integrating the data with key customer attributes to add a different dimension to an in-depth customer profile. Businesses will be able to segment their customer base and understand the voice of their customer at a granular level, allowing them to engage operationally with their customers on an individual basis.
From a broader perspective, organizations will be able to leverage text/sentiment analytics to track trends and growth rates of statistically significant but quantitatively infrequent issues and fix them before they grow to have a real impact on customer experience and sentiment.
