CRM stays high on the agenda, says Gartner
CRM remains high on the business agenda for CIOs in 2010. According to the Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) 2010 CIO Agenda survey, attracting and retaining new customers will be the No. 5 business priority for CIOs in 2010. Which begs the question what on earth can be more important than attracting and retaining customers?
We thought you would want to know, like us, so we went and asked.
According to the survey, and it has to be stressed this involved talking to Chief Information Officers, or rather IT geeks, the five top business priorities were:
1. Business process improvement
2. Reducing enterprise costs
3. Increasing the use of information/analytics
4. Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness
5. Attracting and retaining new customers
The five technology priorities were:
1. Virtualization
2. Cloud computing
3. Web 2.0
4. Networking, voice and data communications
5. Business intelligence
So that explains why marketing and customer faced departments are always in despair.
Gartner’s predictions for CRM in 2010 and beyond include are also significant, because they illustrate the exponential growth in importance of internet based communication channels.
Facebook
By the end of 2010, Facebook will be the No. 1 social network in all but 25 countries, but it will not be No. 1 in Brazil, Russia, India, China or Japan.
“Facebook membership hit 300 million in September 2009, and is roughly doubling each year,” said Mr Thompson. “It is reasonable to assume that it will attain a membership of 600 million (including inactive accounts and a small number of users with multiple accounts) by the end of 2010 based on the trajectory in 2009.” Marketers and customer service management will need to switch focus from the large number of social networks to the three or four that will dominate specific languages.
More bad news for marketing
Through 2010, marketing budgets will remain flat in more than 90 per cent of companies, despite a return to growth.
CFOs are demanding increased accountability from marketing departments, often exerting unprecedented pressure to link programmes to sales results and return on investment (ROI). “As a result, marketing organisations will need to automate operational processes and learn how to leverage technology to measure areas previously left unmeasured, enabling them to do more for less and articulate business value,” said Kimberly Collins, managing vice president at Gartner. “Marketing resource management (MRM) will become a top priority for marketing organisations, and enterprise marketing management (EMM) will take on new meaning as a vehicle for strategic planning, collaboration and measurement.”
By the end of 2010, more than 80 per cent of market growth in social applications will centre around a business use case for improving external customer relationships, rather than improving internal collaboration.
Although the hype around any and all social media activities will continue through 2010, companies are struggling to find a business case, including hard metrics and specific business outcomes, using general social activities and generic social applications. Nevertheless, social projects evaluated by Gartner show that those with a clear and direct mutual purpose (benefits for both company and customer) were the ones likely to show measurable results. Gartner said that the social application vendors that make the transition from general purpose to support for specific business, with use cases and key performance indicators, will see double- or triple-digit growth in 2010.
By the end of 2011, more than 90 per cent of Fortune 1000 marketing campaigns will include online marketing, up from 50 per cent in 2009.
Marketers are responding to the expansion of the internet by investing in addressable branding and advertising, and contextual, community and transactional marketing. “Being online gives marketers greater access to response attribution metrics to help determine what is working and what isn’t working in a campaign,” said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner.