CRM Strategy and Customer Experience Primer for 2019
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CRM Strategy and Customer Experience Primer for 2019 Published: 5 February 2019 ID: G00375892 Analyst(s): Jim Davies, Ed Thompson, Michael Chiu, Don Scheibenreif Improving the customer relationship remains a key area of focus for most Gartner clients. We outline our 2019 research plans for CRM and CX to help application leaders support these two different mission-critical priorities. Scope CRM and CX are separate but overlapping and interconnected enterprisewide initiatives garnering a high degree of executive support and scrutiny. They are often key elements of digital transformation. In 2019, we will focus our research around these topics: ■ CRM strategy ■ CRM execution ■ CX strategy ■ CX execution
Analysis
Figure 1. CRM Strategy and Customer Experience Management Overview
Source: Gartner (February 2019)
Customer experience (CX) initiatives are not the same as customer relationship management (CRM).
Both, however, are among the most important initiatives for organizations because they directly
contribute to the CEO’s top business priorities.
CRM is a mature business discipline that can trace its history back to 1982. Over 80% of CRM
projects are not enterprisewide and so we have complementary agendas to cover sales, marketing,
commerce and customer service (see Note 1). The primary challenge from enterprisewide CRM is
not the implementation of CRM technology, but the accompanying need to ensure business
leadership before starting, a clear strategy from those business leaders, change management and
benefits measurement. When the project scope extends across multiple departments, it requires the
prioritization and management of multiple projects and the cultivation of enterprisewide
collaboration. The CRM research in this agenda is primarily focused on helping address these
challenges and builds on Gartner’s 20 years of experience covering the topic.
CX is an immature business discipline that has only significantly evolved in the last decade.
Increasingly, however, there is now a head of CX in place in organizations. These CX leaders aim to
represent the customer and make improvements to the CX as the primary goal, rather than as a side
effect of achieving the company goal. Application leaders supporting a CX initiative must balance
the requirements of individual departments to hit their key performance indicators (KPIs) with the
wider goal of improving the CX. Likewise, there are often tensions between wider enterprise
programs such as digital transformation, which often wish to prioritize revenue growth over CX. It
will also be critical to understand emerging trends and embrace new technologies that can
differentiate the company on the basis of a superior CX. Gartner has over 80 analysts who cover CX
from a variety of perspectives to help ensure the success of CX initiatives.
Page 2 of 10 Gartner, Inc. | G00375892Top Challenges and How Gartner Can Help
The top challenges for enterprisewide CRM projects are in gaining executive buy-in, organizational
change management, process definition, technology adoption, defining a clear strategy and
measuring the business benefits. The top challenges for CX initiatives are how to get started with
CX, defining a clear CX vision, measuring the voice of the customer, setting up an effective
governance structure, project prioritization and measuring business benefits.
Our research on CRM and CX aims to help in: (1) assessing CRM and CX maturity; (2) showing best
practices and the pitfalls to avoid in laying solid foundations; (3) sharing what the most advanced
organizations are doing to achieve competitive differentiation; (4) prioritizing between CRM and CX
projects; and (5) helping select technologies that will support delivering on CRM and CX goals.
The topics we cover include these areas:
■ CRM strategy: Examining the choices that must be made about where to compete, how winning
will be defined, and what capabilities need to be invested in to achieve goals like sales revenue
growth, improved campaign conversion rates or lower cost of service.
■ CRM execution: Delving into the people, process and technology considerations required to
deliver the customer relationship strategy.
■ CX strategy: Examining the choices that need to be made about where to compete, how
winning will be defined, and what capabilities need to be invested in to achieve goals like
improved satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.
■ CX execution: Delving into the people, process and technology considerations required to
deliver the CX strategy.
Some content may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription. Contact an Account
Executive if you wish to discuss expanding your access to Gartner content.
Our research addresses the following common client questions.
How will organizations identify, evaluate, select, adopt and maintain CRM and CX
technologies?
In the era of digital business, application leaders are expected to bring in best-practice lessons and
ideas for technology innovations from other organizations. Fortunately, in the area of CRM, new
technologies and providers continue to proliferate, providing plenty of choices. Technologies such
as advanced analytics, virtual customer assistants, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning
and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) are hot on organizations’ agendas for exploration (see
“What’s Hot in CRM Applications in 2018”). Unfortunately, the expectations of marketing, sales,
digital commerce and customer service leaders are high in terms of seeing quick results. Many IT
organizations are on the path to adopting bimodal IT, with a different governance and technology
framework for commodity IT operations and solutions to support differentiating and innovative
business ideas.
Gartner, Inc. | G00375892 Page 3 of 10To optimize and innovate the CX, application leaders must play a close supporting role for many
different business departments, and at the same time anticipate the way in which new technologies
and projects will be commissioned. IT’s role is becoming much more critical, requiring a change of
mindset in terms of becoming more proactive and agile in delivery, as well as in developing new
skills. More focus needs to be put on customer-centric experience design, multichannel journey
orchestration, and centralization or federation of customer interaction databases to enable real-time
insights and actions that cover the end-to-end customer journey (see “Make Your Customer
Engagement Hub Real Time With Continuous Intelligence”).
Planned Research
■ Gartner’s CRM application selection criteria
■ “Toolkit: RFI for Evaluating CRM Software Vendor’s Costs, Services, Viability and Vision”
■ Voice of the customer analytics
■ “Market Guide for Customer Journey Analytics”
■ “The Elusive Magic Quadrant for CRM”
■ CRM application functionality starfish
■ Top emerging technologies and their impact on CX
■ Digital experience monitoring tools and CX
■ How organizations achieve operational and analytical Customer360
■ A CRM capability assessment of the leading CRM suite providers
How will organizations measure and improve CRM and CX process execution?
Measure CRM: The measurement of CRM projects is a serious challenge and often underestimated.
Enterprisewide CRM projects often have too many competing top-level business goals and thus run
into internal conflict. For example, increased cross-selling and upselling in a contact center may be
good for increased sales revenue, but take resources away from answering service calls and so
negatively impact customer satisfaction scores. But the bigger challenge is in measuring the return
on investment (ROI) of a CRM project. Only 20% of companies can prove the financial return of their
CRM project investments (see “The Eight Building Blocks of CRM: Metrics”).
Improve CRM: Creating an effective enterprisewide CRM project requires that customer-facing
processes be considered across the enterprise, rather than as separate, siloed entities. The hardest
work for many organizations will be breaking through the departmental silos common in almost
every industry. Such change can be difficult to institute. Finding a champion in the executive suite
who understands how a holistic approach can drive a better CRM strategy can smooth the path.
Measure CX management: The projects that start with customer satisfaction, loyalty or advocacy as
the primary goal are CX projects. Those that aim for cost savings, customer acquisition, conversion
or cross-selling as the primary goal are not CX projects. However, those that are more successful in
Page 4 of 10 Gartner, Inc. | G00375892improving the CX also measure the correlations and causality between product and service quality,
operational metrics, and employee engagement metrics with customer satisfaction, loyalty and
advocacy. CX projects have the same challenge as CRM projects in measuring the ROI. Only 12%
of companies can prove the financial return of their CX project investments (see “How to Manage
Customer Experience Metrics”).
Improve CX management: Process re-engineering that looks across customer-facing departments
to improve end-to-end processes is a good step forward, but customer journey mapping is often
the first sign that an organization is really thinking from the customer’s perspective. Designing the
customer journey requires persona development and outside-in thinking. It has close ties to design
thinking. But too few organizations use fact-based research to inform either persona development
or customer journey design work, do not have a diverse enough development team, and view it as a
one-off exercise (see “Building High-Performance Teams: Diversity Matters”).
Planned Research
■ “The Eight Building Blocks of CRM: Strategy”
■ “The Eight Building Blocks of CRM: Customer Experience”
■ “The Eight Building Blocks of CRM: Processes”
■ “The Eight Building Blocks of CRM: Overview”
■ VOC analytics
■ “The Definition of Customer Experience Management”
■ Beware the siren call of “quick win” CX projects
How will organizations address employee/team/constituent influence on CRM and CX?
Application leaders are expected to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past 20 years of CRM
projects. Delivering the technology and project on time, on budget and within scope is no longer
enough. When failing due to poor change management, politics, user adoption, insufficient ROI,
lack of executive support or just pure lack of strategy, it is no longer possible for IT to point a finger
at the business. IT must now also help the project deliver business results. Application leaders must
challenge departmental leaders for the details when they just ask for “some CRM” (see “Changing
Behaviors: From Working in Silos to Working Collaboratively”).
Leadership and governance are essential requirements for successful CX execution. Governance
will ensure consistent management, cohesive policies, guidance, processes and decision rights for
a given area of responsibility, and proper oversight and accountability. Setting up a framework at
both departmental and organizational levels is, therefore, an important requirement. However, there
is often confusion as to what approach is “best” and what exactly a CX governance framework
includes. The link between employees’ experiences and the CX has been well-proven at the
company level, but more difficult to prove at the individual employee level. The primary objective of
a digital-ready workplace is to boost employee agility and engagement. The future of work is about
Gartner, Inc. | G00375892 Page 5 of 10forging a new relationship between technology and talent that transforms existing ways of working
and doing business. Indeed, Gartner predicts that, by 2022, operational efficiency will be of less
strategic importance than employee engagement in 50% of customer engagement centers globally
(see “The Future of Work and Talent: Culture, Diversity, Technology”).
Planned Research
■ The first 100 days a of CX leader — how IT can help
■ Adding back chaos for the advanced CX leader
■ The digital workplace and CX
■ How to run a do-it-yourself customer journey mapping workshop
■ CX improvement and optimization
How will organizations plan for the future of CRM and CX?
The further from the center of the organization, the greater the influence of customers and suppliers
and therefore more volatility in process and work habit change, and so the greater need for frequent
adjustment to technologies. In response, new technologies for marketing, sales, commerce and
customer service keep arriving thick and fast. It is no surprise that CRM is now the largest
enterprise application software market and remains one of the fastest growing. The impact on
adjacent application types is also important — not least in markets like analytics and content
management software. The challenge of keeping current with the many options is not a trivial one,
and being aware of the technology opportunities and taking advantage of them is what sets leading
companies apart.
Increasingly, customer relationships will be managed through a customer engagement hub (CEH),
which is an architectural framework that ties multiple systems together to optimally engage the
customer (see “Ten Steps for Planning Your Customer Engagement Hub”). The challenge is that a
CEH is not “owned” by a specific department or digital leader, and requires cross-department
collaboration. By 2020, 60% of large organizations will try to design a customer engagement hub,
yet only half of them will select the correct technologies to make it work.
Planning for a future CX requires an appreciation of demand and supply. Customers’ demands will
shift based on demographic, societal, economic, regulatory and technological shifts, and supply will
alter based on organizational aspiration, executive ambition and financial strength. Matching supply
and demand will mean constant adjustments. Providing a world-leading experience will not be
achievable for all given the associated investment required. Seeking agreement on the vision and
then having a roadmap to get there as one united organization is something all application leaders
will need to help contribute to and facilitate.
Customer-centric, contextualized experiences based on customer journey analytics will become the
competitive differentiator for the future of CX, requiring organizations to leverage new types of
analysis and data sources. By 2020, more than 40% of all data and analytics projects will relate to
an aspect of CX, and spending on real-time analytics will grow three times faster than spending on
Page 6 of 10 Gartner, Inc. | G00375892non-real-time analytics. AI will provide many new opportunities to accelerate customer goals, but
will create just as many challenges to be overcome.
Planned Research
■ “What’s Hot in CRM Applications in 2019”
■ “The Gartner Customer Experience Management Maturity Model”
■ “Toolkit: The Customer Experience Maturity Model”
■ Getting beyond CX Maturity Level 3
■ How CX leaders can prepare for the future of customers
■ What ContinuousNext means for CX
■ How CRM technologies support future digital business models
■ Trends in CX
Related Priorities
Table 1. Related Priorities
Priority Focus
Digital Commerce Gartner helps clients understand the impact of specific technologies, business models,
Technologies organizational structures and strategies on their existing or aspirational digital commerce
practices.
Sales Technology The sales technology research agenda focuses on the selection, delivery and maintenance
of tools that optimize how sellers and managers conduct their daily sales processes.
Customer Service and Many technologies and best practices are needed to create a leading customer service
Support Technology and support organization and its associated operational, customer experience and
employee experience aspirations.
Source: Gartner
Suggested First Steps
■ “How to Tell the Difference Between Customer Experience and CRM Projects”: CX management
projects differ from CRM projects in eight key ways. By understanding these differences, IT
managers supporting such projects will be better-able to set goals and effectively scope them.
■ “The Eight Building Blocks of CRM: Overview”: CRM initiatives require a proven framework to
ensure that projects are approached on a balanced, integrated and strategic basis. Applying
this proven framework will help CRM project leaders to maximize the benefits.
Gartner, Inc. | G00375892 Page 7 of 10■ “How to Prioritize Customer Experience Projects”: Companies in the process of improving their
CX often take on more projects than their resources can handle. Application leaders can
prioritize their CX projects by utilizing an objective scoring framework.
Essential Reading
■ “What’s Hot in CRM Applications in 2018”: What’s hot in CRM varies by department, but AI,
predictive technologies and other forms of analytics are the common denominators. By
outlining the other key areas of interest for application leaders supporting CRM, we can reveal
leading indicators of future intentions.
■ “2019 Strategic Roadmap for CRM Technologies”: Pursuing customer centricity as part of
digital transformation often results in changes to CRM applications. Application leaders
supporting CRM and the CX must develop a roadmap to manage their CRM application
portfolios, architecture and processes to match changing requirements.
■ “How to Manage Customer Experience Metrics”: Hundreds of CX metrics exist. Large
organizations will often use more than 50, and no organization uses the same combination. IT
leaders supporting CX initiatives must understand the four most common categories for CX
metrics — quality, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy — and how to manage them.
■ “Seven Types of Customer Experience Project”: Many companies are running different types of
projects to improve the CX, each with unique challenges. Application leaders supporting CX
managers will achieve better results if they start by auditing existing work and coordinating
existing efforts.
Tools and Toolkits
■ “Toolkit: The Gartner CRM Maturity Model”: CRM and CX are often among the most important
initiatives for an organization. The Gartner CRM Maturity Model gives application leaders a
framework for measuring their organization’s CRM maturity level, and can serve as a key artifact
to start the conversation on enterprisewide CRM.
■ “Toolkit: Evaluate CRM Software Using Gartner’s Five Request for Information Templates —
Vision, Viability, Services, Costs and Usability”: Organizations assessing CRM vendors’
products need to consider seven selection criteria. This Toolkit helps evaluation teams build
focused requirements documents for collecting initial, comprehensive data and for determining
appropriate prospective vendors.
■ “Toolkit: CRM Industry Heat Map”: Use the CRM Industry Heat Map in this Toolkit to compare
your organization against competitors in your industry. It can help justify increased investments
in CRM if your organization lags behind in your industry, or uncover opportunities from the CRM
application types in which you have not yet invested.
Note 1 Complementary Agendas
Over 80% of CRM projects would be better-described as a marketing, sales, customer service or
commerce application project as they focus on delivering benefits for one department. Gartner
covers the details of these projects in four other research agendas: sales technology, customer
Page 8 of 10 Gartner, Inc. | G00375892service and support technology, digital commerce, and marketing technology. If your CRM project is
not enterprisewide, we would recommend the research in those agendas. Similarly, there will also
likely be merit in leveraging the customer analytics research produced as part of Gartner’s BI team
agenda, analytics and BI strategies.
Our CRM and CX research looks at external, revenue and policy-driving customers and
stakeholders. Some CIOs consider internal stakeholders to be their customers. Many of the lessons
from CRM and CX can be applied to internal customers and we have research agendas that look at
this topic — specifically, IT operations transformation and digital workplace program.
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