Companies must make decisions to modernize while navigating a challenging economic climate. They must balance the need for speed and agility against cost pressures. They must balance the need to better serve customers against pressures to reduce headcount.
Forrester sees more companies turning to industry CRM to help manage these journeys. Our data backs this up: industry clouds, of which industry CRM grows at a CAGR of 13.9%, a rate faster than horizontal CRM.
Industry CRM Delivers A Clear Path To Value
Industry CRM:
- De-risks cloud migrations. Many companies still use homegrown legacy CRM or industry-specific CRM designed for on-premises data centers. Industry CRM provides out-of-the-box core processes, industry data models, and packaged adapters to back-office systems that provide a clear path to modernization.
- Reduces the burden of regulatory compliance. Industry data models connect CRM to a broad ecosystem. Compliant infrastructures guarantee that data is protected, processed, and stored according to industry regulations. Together, these address the problems of systemic risks that most organizations face with security, regulatory, and compliance.
- Drives better software adoption. Forty-four percent of CRM deployments struggle with poor user adoption as workflows and experiences must be customized to add value to each front-office worker. Industry CRM provides experiences that have been battle-tested for a particular vertical.
- Creates value at every step. Industry CRM builds on top of horizontal CRM, and companies can start with what they initially need and adapt as they grow. Value compounds when more product is adopted. For example, a manufacturer can start by deploying workflows to monitor asset uptime, followed by capabilities for preventive maintenance and depot repair. This allows the manufacturer to modernize in stages, realizing a return on investment at every stage.
- Focuses the front office on value-added work to better serve customers. Industry CRM guides the front office through predefined workflows while automating common user tasks. This reduces errors, shrinks internal costs, and allows the front office to work on higher-value tasks. These workflows also capture data that was previously too labor-intensive to extract. It enables organizations to mine broader and more reliable data sets to reveal new insights.
Each company must navigate the decision of when and how to adopt industry clouds, weighing cost savings and agility gains against core requirements. Read our report on industry CRM to help navigate this decision and to learn how vendors are verticalizing their CRM.
