The best-known companies who are selling CRM systems today on the SaaS platform include Salesforce.com, today a $1B company, RightNow Technologies and SugarCRM both of which are growing at an average of 7% to 10% a year in revenue and new subscribers (Tsai, 2010).
How Trends Today Will Reshape the Market Tomorrow
All of these trends of analytics, process-based application development, and SaaS platform development will accelerate the adoption and use of CRM systems over time. In addition, the use of SaaS-based platforms is going to open up the use of customer information stored on social networks. In the next five years, social networks and CRM applications will be tightly integrated together, providing more insights than ever before into customer needs, wants and preferences. The exponential growth of social networks and the wealth of customer data contained in them is also a dominant trend in the development of future generation CRM systems as well. The role of social networks as a means to listen to customers more accurately and with greater focus is going to revolutionize CRM strategies, systems and processes for the foreseeable future (Bernoff, Li, 2008).
Conclusion
The future...
Adding to this depth of functionality will be the addition of analytics and the ability to measure the performance of every customer strategy undertaken.
References
Bernoff, J., & Li, C.. (2008). Harnessing the Power of the Oh-So-Social Web. MIT Sloan Management Review, 49(3), 36-42.
Lashar, J.. (2009, May). To SaaS or Not to SaaS? Customer Relationship Management, 13(5), 14-15.
Rapp, a., Trainor, K., & Agnihotri, R.. (2010). Performance implications of customer-linking capabilities: Examining the complementary role of customer orientation and CRM technology. Journal of Business Research, 63(11), 1229.
Jayanthi Ranjan, & Vishal Bhatnagar. (2008). Principles for successful aCRM in organizations. Direct Marketing, 2(4), 239-247.
Shang, S., & Lin, S.. (2010). People-driven processes in customer relationship management. The Service Industries Journal, 30(14), 2441.
Tsai, J.. (2010, February). Google Wave Makes a Splash…
