TECHNOLOGY
several dozen cloud-based solutions: the trend has been moving towards more solutions, not fewer. Part of the reason for this is that technology has become much more democratised — individual employees and small teams are empowered to find, experiment with and introduce tools that make their jobs easier and provide value to customers. And vendors have made their products easier to find, to try-out, and to buy on a small scale, pre-empting the laborious enterprise sales cycle. Apps create a boom in customer data The explosion of apps and solutions,
and the innovative way vendors are packaging them and bringing them to market, has been a huge boost to a company’s ability to adapt and to create a delightful customer experience. But this explosion also comes at a cost: it takes organisations away from a single view of customer data. Therefore, the advance many companies are looking forward to is the ability for all those solutions to easily interoperate and share customer data seamlessly. While we can offer such an all-in-one solution, we also recognise that one company cannot claim a monopoly on all advancements in the field. To benefit from all advances in the market, the smartest businesses will adopt a general-purpose CRM platform, which allows them to benefit from more innovation on the market without compromising integration or efficiency. The marketplace is starting to place a premium on software that prizes integration over a single-vendor solution. As technology providers respond to that demand, the easier it will be for businesses to have single, complete view of their customer. Technology to anticipate customers’ wants and needs For years now at HubSpot, we have made extensive use of personas as part of the inbound marketing on which our solution is based. A persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer based on market research and real data about existing customers. Most companies create several personas to develop their marketing plans. But in the business-to-consumer world, we see a big shift away from personas. Companies are becoming less inclined to make a whole group of customers fit into a box. Rather, they are using AI and machine learning to develop highly individualised messaging and offerings. For example, music streaming subscription service Spotify does not use a persona like “ageing rocker”; instead it creates a unique music mix based on previous music selections and algorithms based on the choices of millions of other users.
The explosion of apps and solutions, and the innovative way vendors are packaging them and bringing them to market, has been a huge boost to a company’s ability to adapt and to create a delightful customer experience.
2019 GLOBAL SRM RESEARCH REPORT
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