Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Recent shifts in how companies are buying customer relationship management software illustrate the speed with which mobile apps are changing the enterprise IT landscape.
Increasingly, many enterprises see mobile- and cloud-based CRM apps playing a key role in helping staff to attract and interact proactively with customers. But organizations will need to ensure they have the necessary app development, management and integration skills in place if they are to build these apps into their wider mobility strategies.
Gartner predicts that by 2014 there will be more than 1,200 mobile CRM apps available for download from app stores, up from 200 in 2012. Cloud-based CRM services are also on the rise: The research company forecasts that in 2016 more than 50% of total CRM software revenue for certain types of applications will be delivered as software as a service.
The increased use of mobile-based CRM apps reflects a wider move to real-time customer experience management, in which sales, marketing and customer support agents respond to customers’ actions and demands as they happen, rather than reacting to CRM records once the agents are back at the office. Indeed, a CRM strategy that incorporates mobile- and cloud-based apps promises to create a more flexible and collaborative environment to better attract, serve, retain and sell to customers.
The targeted nature of apps means they can be harnessed to enable sales and service staff to draw on customer intelligence from social sites as well as other business units. Real-time mobile CRM also enables the managers of business units to gain a better understanding of sales and customer support activity as it happens.
But a customer experience management strategy that depends increasingly on the flexibility of mobile and social media apps will require enterprises to review their approach to structuring and managing software usage and collaboration.
Any CRM strategy should ensure a transparent flow of customer information so that the right employees can access and share the right data at the right time, and take appropriate action, without risking the integrity of customer and company data. Mobile CRM apps are no different.
Organizations will need to evaluate which mobile app functions best suit their needs — no small task given the current proliferation of mobile CRM solutions — and determine which apps will be the easiest for employees and customers to use across a wide range of smartphones and tablets.
Fernando Alvarez leads Capgemini’s  Mobile Solutions Global Service Line.
