What’s on the horizon for customer relationships: 2023 predictions

After speaking to experts, looking at our own data, and diving into industry research, here are some of the biggest customer success trends to expect this coming year:

1. Breaking down silos to bring everyone together

Departmental fragmentation is so 2022. In 2023, it’s all about bringing everyone together, including sales and marketing, with some shared goals. The success of your business — and, more importantly, your customers’ success — depends on more than just one department working towards the same goal.

Having a centralized system, like a CRM solution, makes working toward a common goal much easier. While you might already have sales, marketing and operations using CRM, they might be using different pipelines — preventing cross-departmental visibility and coordination. Bringing in customer success, finance and executives can help increase organizational alignment even more. (Learn more about how different teams use CRM in our CRM playbook.)

This year, we expect to see more companies increasing their CRM user base and sharing pipelines to work together toward common goals.

2. Personalization and putting the customer first

Can we all agree that one-size-fits-all never actually fits everyone? In fact, these types of solutions rarely fit anyone very well. With customer-centricity so crucial, personalization is the bridge to get there. In other words, a one-size-fits-all approach to customer care will not cut it. Now, with the emphasis on first-party data, companies will need to find more ways to collect and make sense of their customer data. That’s where CRM comes into play.

While many CRM platforms still serve as an organized contact database, we expect companies to start using CRM to store much more than contact data. One of the biggest CRM trends for this year will be the emphasis on collecting and analyzing behavioral data like:

• The number of product demos received
• Email open ratio
• Which content they downloaded
• The number of meetings or webinars attended
• And more

Once this data is collected and stored in the CRM system, you can use it to personalize your marketing and sales efforts further.

3. Further investment in mobile CRM and ease-of-use

Mobile CRM tools are moving from a nice-to-have to must-have. As more companies adapt to remote and hybrid working environments, the need for a mobile and adaptable CRM solution has intensified.

It’s not just about having a mobile version, either. This need for mobile CRM capabilities speaks to a bigger issue: the necessity for a more adaptive CRM. For example, we expect to see more features that adapt to the changing way that people work — like the Copper Chrome extension, which makes it possible to work right from Gmail without ever swapping tabs.

In today’s whiplash business landscape, your CRM solution and other tools must work with you quickly from wherever you are, and we expect technology developments over the next year to reflect this reality.

4. Heavier emphasis on analytics

The importance of data analysis and interpretation will be paramount in 2023. To ensure positive business outcomes, organizations must effectively structure and analyze the data captured by their CRM systems, allowing them to generate accurate, timely reports that inform next steps. Many CRM solutions have pre-built reports already available, and we expect that companies that aren’t using these features will start using them this year.

Plus, we anticipate more companies using additional data analysis tools — from Google Analytics 4, to Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), product data tools like Sherlock and more — to identify strengths, potential issues and further opportunities, enabling them to effectively meet the demands of their clients and remain agile in the face of changing market dynamics.

5. Incorporating self-service options

In 2023, businesses that can provide quality customer service to their clients and customers will be the most successful. Self-service options such as a knowledge base with peer-to-peer support are vital in achieving that goal.

Many customers prefer to use a self-help system to find solutions to their problems themselves because it’s more convenient and they control the process. Not only are self-serve resources available 24/7, but they allow consumers to resolve problems themselves while avoiding an often-frustrating experience calling in to a customer care line.

Plus, self-service saves time for both the customers and the organization, resulting in greater efficiency for all. That’s why having a well-maintained, easily accessible knowledge base with reliable answers and helpful peer-to-peer support is likely to be a major factor in achieving customer satisfaction this year.

2023 is sure to bring many CRM trends that businesses need to embrace to remain competitive. By doing things like tapping into the power of personalization, breaking down silos, and incorporating self-service options, successful organizations will gain the insight needed to better understand and meet customer needs.

As always, relationships and customer service should remain front and center, and your CRM system will be critical to aligning these efforts across departments. As businesses strive to retain and maintain in what’s expected to be another bumpy year ahead, keeping everyone on the same page is key.

If you don’t have a CRM platform that’s primed and ready to put these trends in customer success into action, consider giving Copper CRM a try. We’re the only Google-recommended CRM on the market, and we’re ready to help you make 2023 your best year yet. Try Copper free for 14 days.