Web 2.0 Acceleration: If it wasn’t clear before, we now absolutely live in an instantaneous and interconnected world that our CRM processes must reflect. Growth of open CRM systems, particularly “as a service” platforms will accelerate to leverage social, mobile and global dimensions of essentially the same issue of managing and facilitating customer relationships. Self-serve will gain more prominence as technology makes it easier to facilitate cross-communication among customers. Integration of Data: Salesforce.com’s launch of database.com will trigger a new trend towards taking the PAIN out of everything data-related: creating, consolidating, cleansing, appending and extracting intelligence. The idea is bring all these functions into one place, including applying domain expertise. You could argue that benefits might be limited to a particular platform, but this phenomenon will gain momentum as more CRM systems “open-up” as well. Embedded BI/predictive actions: Insights are good, but actions are better because ultimately they drive revenue, save costs or increase margins. Companies already invested in CRM will seek to get more out of it by increasing high value analytic content and driving consistent actions across and within all channels. With analytic integration further facilitated by tools such as predictive modeling markup language (PMML), the latency from …Read More