We’ve once again reached the annual time of reflection and planning. As you move through 2024, a fair amount of unpredictable events are bound to pop up. But aligning with industry predictions early can keep your business afloat and your clients happy year-round.
The landscape of customer relationship management (CRM) continues to evolve rapidly, with advancements in CRM tools reshaping how businesses interact with customers.
CRMs are no longer limited to contact management and opportunity tracking for sales teams. Many of them are comprehensive platforms that provide support for every moment of the customer journey.
If you provide services, you need a structured method of tracking and updating client information. This is the primary purpose of CRM software, and your first goal in using a CRM should be to maintain a clean and accurate client database.
To be most useful, client profiles should include enriched and custom data, including communication history, preferences, renewal dates and other vital details your team can reference in each customer interaction. Some teams even use CRMs to store clients’ birthdays and other information that can assist with personalization.
CRM solutions now focus on features that guide customer-focused teams as they nurture relationships. Those may look like: tools for segmenting and filtering clients based on various criteria, managing follow-ups with automated rules and notifications and integrating with other apps that expand the platform’s functionality to link client records to project management, ticketing, billing and more.
<10-profitability-essentials>
Thus, organizing client data is only the beginning of a larger opportunity to improve your efficiency and service delivery with a CRM as one of your core technology solutions.
While your business is unique, it’s operating in micro- and macro-environments that have a dramatic impact on its success. Many business teams have learned that falling behind in digital transformation is a sure way to lose market appeal and drive away existing clients. It’s critical to stay abreast of what today’s consumers expect and the kind of technology that’s available to boost customer satisfaction.
You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) jump from platform to platform trying to keep up with customer relationship management trends. However, knowing what’s available will give you a strong sense of what to look for when it’s time to consolidate your tech stack to create a new sales process, improve client retention or achieve any other aim this year.
Read on to discover some of the trends you’ll see in the CRM industry in 2024.
The following trends reflect both technological advancements and the continued drive for companies, especially small businesses, to gain a deeper understanding of the people they serve. We’ll explore how they’re transforming operations and impacting strategic decisions, as well as their practical applications in professional services.
One of the most significant edits to CRM platforms has been the expansion of touchpoints via built-in self-service options. Businesses are increasingly incorporating hands-off modes of interaction such as chatbots and client portals to meet customer needs more efficiently.
In some cases, clients can view project statuses, access important documents or submit queries, which makes their everyday questions and concerns less of a burden to a client service team while still feeling that someone is paying close attention to their needs.
Automation, particularly as a result of new developments in artificial intelligence, streamlines everything for internal teams. CRMs have historically only housed sales-related automations. However, CRM providers are expanding capabilities to incorporate automations that tie together marketing, sales, invoicing and more.
These innovations promise several obvious benefits, most significantly saving CRM users lots of time. Let’s say you run a boutique accounting firm. You might automate appointment scheduling, send reminders for tax document submission and update your clients on their tax return status, all from one platform.
Some businesses are still recovering from the onslaught of new technology (mostly SaaS) they acquired when adapting to new work environments during the pandemic. Amid ongoing economic pressures expected to continue into 2024, there’s a broad movement in the business world towards simplification and efficiency. We’ll see an even greater emphasis on tech consolidation than we did in 2023, and that will carry over into the selection of CRM software solutions.
Business owners are likely to choose CRM platforms that centralize multiple client work functions. A comprehensive suite of tools or one that can easily integrate with a couple of must-have applications ups the chances of being able to deliver a cohesive customer experience. Smart operations teams will minimize risk by providing their teams with integrated CRMs — client work management platforms that reduce the impact of the “toggling tax,” or the cost of constantly switching between platforms.
Consolidation in professional services generates much more value than just increased productivity and cost savings. When done efficiently, it drives up the lifetime value of client relationships. For example, an IT team might currently use separate tools for form creation, request prioritization and ticket management. Cutting back will reduce stress and confusion for team members while speeding up customer support, resulting in more pleasant experiences from both angles.
The best way to use a CRM to confidently drive your business through 2024 is to carefully choose a CRM platform that’s fully integrated with all of your client work functions. With Accelo, all of your time logs, projects, tickets, retainers, invoices and more tie back to the client record. Read more about the advantages of having a CRM that’s part of a client work management platform.
How we generate, consume and analyze data is ever-changing. Instead of referring to yesterday’s data to try to predict what happens tomorrow (the old way), professional services teams are looking to achieve the gold standard: access to real-time customer data that tells stories via segmentation and easy-to-access dashboards.
Instead of having data living in multiple places and manually exporting CRM data to another platform, many will choose more powerful CRMs with auto-generated reports and insights to surface patterns in sales activity, close rates and customer retention. A robust CRM, or CRM integration with a business intelligence platform, can offer these and other valuable insights about customer behavior and demographics. More importantly, it may support advanced predictive analytics and accurate forecasting.
Accessible customer insights will give service businesses a leg up in 2024 because they can be leveraged to create messaging that resonates more deeply. An accounting firm that’s been struggling to get engagement on social media channels could use a downward trending renewal rate as an opportunity to create a new marketing campaign that includes an honest video series about whether hiring an accountant is worth the expense.
Sometimes, the most creative ideas are inspired by hard facts, and in the coming year, we may see a spike in ingenuity as an answer to 2023’s largely algorithm-driven content. CRM software can be surprisingly supportive of this kind of change.
➡️ Get started on your CRM-powered goals for 2024 using our convenient lists of the best CRMs for consulting, architecture and all service-based industries.
Traditionally associated with salespeople, CRMs are continuing to expand their reach as key tech platforms for a variety of people across organizations. This trend will be pronounced in 2024 because of the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of business operations. It also goes hand in hand with consolidation and a desire for operational efficiency.
For a while, most service professionals have understood that customer relationships are not just the domain of sales or marketing teams. Every interaction a client has with any person, content or communication impacts their brand awareness and impression of the company. How can you give everyone on your team a view of the same information at any moment? Good CRM software is the answer. It’s versatile and can be broadly adopted to offer consistent visibility.
In a management consulting firm in 2024, you might expect to see a sales team using a CRM to develop workflows that optimize their playbook, consultants using customer data to tailor their strategies and a finance department using the same CRM for quick billing. Every department will source information from and contribute to a unified business ecosystem.
Much of our daily activity now takes place on mobile devices. There were 76.8 billion mobile app downloads in the first half of 2023. And there’s an expectation these days that most software will have a mobile app. Yet, there are still advancements to come.
The new generation of CRM systems will bring enhanced content and usability on mobile. Expanded feature sets will enable client-facing professionals to access detailed customer profiles, update sales pipelines, manage marketing campaigns and even perform complex data analysis from their mobile devices. The focus will not just be on viewing data but on having the full capability to edit, update and manage customer information on the go. That means crucial decisions and customer interactions won’t need to be delayed until someone has access to a desktop.
User experience will also see significant improvements, with an emphasis on intuitive design and ease of use. Personalized notifications, simplified dashboards and the integration of machine learning and AI have the potential to further streamline data entry, scheduling, follow-ups and more, making the mobile CRM experience less limited. And these benefits won’t just be revolutionary for field sales reps or others who may have historically needed to travel the most — they’ll impact the large numbers of remote and hybrid employees who serve clients from all over the world.
Insulate your business from the need for dramatic adaptation to future trends by developing a CRM strategy. Reflect upon how your team handles customer relationship management today and how you’d like to incorporate automation, consolidation, robust customer data, cross-departmental visibility and a mobile CRM in 2024 with an Accelo product expert. Book a demo of the platform to start a conversation.
