Ever since it entered the mainstream in the 1990s, customer experience (CX) software has been on the cutting edge of technological innovation. CRM tools, one of the many CX solutions, were among the first enterprise-grade mobile applications, as well as the earliest examples of commercial cloud-based Software as a Service.

In the 2020s, CX vendors and customers continue to find innovative ways to use these solutions to connect with customers and shape relationships with them. The continuous refinement of CX offerings has fueled strong growth in the market: According to Fortune Business Insights, the global CRM market alone is expected to exceed $113 billion by the end of 2027, up from $47.79 billion in 2019. That expansion would represent a 11.6% compound annual growth rate over the time period.

But what specific innovations are fueling the ongoing CX boom? Let’s take a look at some of the major CX trends and the challenges they’re addressing.

1. Expanding use of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way that almost every type of software works, and CX platforms are no exception. AI-powered CX continues to gain steam, delivering key features such as:

• Virtual assistants that can answer questions and automate interactions over multiple communication channels.
• Advanced customer segmentation and lookalike audience modeling.
• Personalization of the channel experience for each customer.
• Surfacing of data insights and suggested actions in real time, i.e., predictive analytics about what a customer might do next.
• Prioritization and classification of requests based on natural language processing.

One global CX leader found that marketers had increased their adoption of AI by almost 200% between 2018 and 2020, and that AI was the number one functionality that they planned to make more extensive use of in the future. At the same time, AI isn’t likely to replace the need for human interaction any time soon, and there are still distinct limitations to AI technologies.

2. The search for a single source of truth

CX platforms are inherently data-intensive tools. As the number of data sources increases with more information pouring in from third-parties, transactions, offline identities and more, sales and marketing teams will be looking for a single source of truth. This trusted data source will spare them from having to manually reconcile different items when making decisions.

Gartner has estimated that only 54% of all marketing decisions used analytics in 2020, but that 85% of executives expected to expand their use of analytics. Doing so will require better data unity, with the CX tool containing or connecting to the analytics that sales and marketing need for their jobs.

3. Social media integrations

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated customer use of digital channels for everything from purchases to meetings. For companies, this means that a larger share — possibly even a majority — of all their customer interactions will be digital, as in-person activity diminishes.

Social media-integrated CX tools can help organizations better understand what their customers are talking about and provide more carefully tailored campaigns, as well as customer support. Social tools may help close the substantial gap between the share of companies that think they give excellent support on social media (80%) and the percentage of customers (8%) who feel the same way.

As your organization considers Customer Experience applications, Inspirage can help. The Inspirage team includes domain experts with deep Oracle expertise that has been applied across a wide range of Industries and implementations. Oracle CX offers a connected suite of applications that goes beyond traditional CRM to help you create, manage, serve, and nurture lasting customer relationships.

Why choose Oracle CX? Unifying all your business application data with your CRM data to align with your customers and your brand promise, delivering tailored customer experience based on your customers’ online behavior, in real time, and using data to fully understand your customers’ needs are just a few of the benefits. Connect with us to learn more about how we can guide your next project.