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With reference to marketing era, we have come to the era of customer satisfaction where continuous interaction with and feedback of customers play a vital role. This information (interaction log and feedback) grows with growing sales and number of customers. It is becoming important to log various conversations, contact details, requirements, promised services/supports/discounts etc. to serve the customers better and hence earn their satisfaction which ultimately leads to better sales and profits.

In this era CRM is playing and will keep playing the most important role by making it easy for us to manage relationships with the customers. It has another benefit, in the continuously changing teams, it ensures that customer data is retained for perusal and hence a customer relation is managed by the organization as a whole than just and individual. Of course processes and systems cannot replace people, but still they are crucial when people decide to change.

As the importance of customers will grow so will increase the need for much better features within CRM to enable organizations to handle their customers and have analytical data for forecasting and measurement purposes. From contacts management to complaints management and from leads to seamlessly integrated customer management (from prospect to delivery).

In my opinion, with growing competition, CRM will lead the way for integrated enterprise solutions which will revolve around CRM. If we see banking perse, this has already started, but it still has a log way to go.

I also think that in coming time a need for shared and collaborative CRM will arise for following reasons
1) As a service provider/supplier I would live to know how a customer deals with another service provider/supplier
2) When organizations become more "open" and understand the need for sharing customer data, they may want to collaborate their CRMs with certain limitations (this has actually started)
3) When a customer decides to drop a supplier and start dealing with another supplier, new supplier will be interested in old records with previous supplier and prev supplier will happily hand it over for a price
4) Things like trade secrets, customer loyalty and customer retention will gradually become shared secrets, shared cust. loyalty and shared retention with regional preferences of the customers and geographical monopoly of various suppliers. this will demand a multi supplier collaborative CRM.
5) increasing integrations of CRM with supplier management systems (catching attraction since last few years) will demand more sharing of information and seamless integration for a more open platform for multi-vendor management.

Another future projection for CRM could be that with growing dynamic needs and expectations from a CRM, providers will start facilitating buyers with checkboxes to select CRM features and pay only for selected features. Like someone who needs a simple contact management may not want to pay for a full fledged CRM like MS dynamics or may not want to take the pain of managing Sugar CRM even if it comes for free. this has already started actually but there's still a long way to go.

This is what I feel. Would love to see more people commenting on this post.