As we put together our latest CRM Market Navigator, we were struck by the unexpected diversity of tools that called themselves “CRM.” Such tools included communications platforms, email automation tools, contact management systems, digital experience personalization systems, agency management systems, and even email servers with alerting and contact lists.
We decided to focus on what we call “core-CRM” platforms: solutions that act as systems of record and sources of truth for customer data, including private, sensitive, and personally identifiable information (PII). Our CRM report in 2021 ended up looking a lot like our CRM report from 2016, which begs the question: Given the diversity of solutions that call themselves “CRM,” what sort of report will we be looking at in, say, 2025? Here are some possibilities:
It will balloon to cover 100+ solutions.
CRM will continue to diversify as interest grows in omni-channel communications platforms that rely on central repositories for customer contact lists and up-to-date activity. Many insurers are just starting to leverage automated communications as part of marketing or CX initiatives. Insurers may adopt these “lighter” tools before a core CRM platform.
This scenario is especially possible if the initiative and budget for these tools come from sales or distribution teams, whose CRM use cases center on independent agents and brokers. Managing an insurer’s communications with a few thousand independent agents requires much lighter tools than managing the billing and claims journeys of tens of thousands of policyholders. The respective price tags of these platforms reflect this difference in complexity. The lower cost of these platforms will make their inclusion unavoidable in a “CRM” market navigator. Like our MarTech 100 or Third-Party Data reports, we might be looking at a “CRM 100” report in 2025.
But is “CRM” the right category for these vendors? We have been calling this type of platform “CCM-CRM” to underscore its close relationship with communications management tools. The email automation, document repository, or SMS components of these platforms are more important to insurers than the CRM component. The data in the CRM components isn’t clean or complete enough to serve core CRM functions. As a result, these 100+ tools might make it into a report, but we probably won’t call them “CRM.”
2021 will have been the last time this report is published.
Some CRMs are becoming CDPs, i.e., customer data platforms. Legacy CRM platforms have morphed into core repositories for customer behavioral data integrated with third-party enrichment providers and first-party data sources. Real-time, analytics-based digital experience personalization drives the expansion of these databases, where “next best action” analytics can instantly serve up the most relevant or engaging content for users.
CDPs are relatively open to the analytics engines activating data and other data providers enriching it. Third-party data enrichment includes direct enrichment via third-party feeds as well as enrichment within marketing “walled gardens” like Facebook or Google. Insurers in these instances don’t have visibility into the algorithms that are segmenting and scoring customer records. However, they can see the results in their digital targeting or persona assignments. The CDP becomes a hub of continuous traffic between several internal and external systems. If the “CRM-to-CDP” trend continues, the next report in this series could be a Market Navigator on CDP, not CRM.
The CDP space is also becoming more defined and separate from CRM. Players in this space are now fully established or soon will be. The CDP space has little startup activity or innovation due to the volume of historical behavioral data necessary to enter the market. The “big” consumer databases for behavioral data have already been acquired, e.g., Krux by Salesforce, BlueKai by Oracle, Acxiom by IPG, Epsilon by Publicis. In insurance, only distribution connectivity data brokers or telematics vendors have the scale to match horizontal CDPs. However, these vendors don’t appear interested in moving towards CDP functionality.
Suppose the “big” suites (Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe) succeed in presenting a unified, seamlessly integrated offering. In that case, the CDP component will be so enmeshed within analytics, CMS, testing, marketing, and personalization components that its stand-alone (and static) capabilities will no longer be available. We won’t write a “CDP Market Navigator” because CDP cannot be teased out.
The report will look much the same.
The very openness, lack of transparency, and accessibility of CDP platforms are antithetical to a real insurer need: A secure system of record to store customer data, manage communications, and record claims, billing, account, and other sensitive data for customer servicing purposes.
Insurers will also increasingly need a place to store data privacy consent settings and personal data deletability, as CPRA, CCPA, or GDPR require. In contrast to the AI-powered, hyper-fast, and third-party analytics that act on CDP data, insurers need to maintain algorithmic transparency to comply with marketing and underwriting regulations.
There probably won’t be many vendors in this space in 2025 because this type of core CRM platform is expensive to customize, configure, and maintain. These costs are not easy to offset with commoditized, monetizable add-ons.
Our next CRM Market Navigator might include some version of the vendors listed in 2021. Perhaps more insurance-specific vendors will refine their CRM offerings and become more dominant. We are confident that there will continue to be “Core CRM” in the marketplace for insurers, as we have defined it, with a handful of vendors continuing to sell their stand-alone solutions.
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