The prognosticating season is on us, so I will stop procrastinating and offer my predictions for customer relationship management (CRM) in 2018: The software leaders (Salesforce and Microsoft) will extend their leads . As in many other areas of technology, the top selling products tend to gain market share, and smaller players wither or are acquired. Salesforce is synonymous to CRM for most companies, especially when they are thinking of sales force automation and customer service. Microsoft will drive Dynamics 365 to buyers of Office 365 as it continues to gain momentum. Microsoft will ship a small business edition of Dynamics 365 for Marketing. This has been announced since over a year ago, but has seemingly slipped into 2018. Cloud deployment of CRM will continue to grow, compared to on premises deployment in corporate data centers. Security accreditation for cloud providers have boosted confidence and allowed even some government customers to adopt cloud deployments. M
From James Townsend, vice president of Sylogist, thoughts on digital transformation, marketing automation, customer relationship management, Power Apps , Microsoft Dynamics 365, government contracting, customer service and more.