Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The CRM Service: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research. This research is part of a portfolio of ISG Buyers Guides in CRM covering marketing, sales, partners, platform, digital commerce and sales engagement.

Customer relationship management (CRM) allows enterprises to support customers with purchased products or services. Customer service is a critical component of any CRM suite. These service applications should provide a unified approach to managing and tracking interactions and support customer service agent operations digitally or in the field.

ISG defines CRM Service as the set of applications that support leaders, managers and agents as they interact with customers, resolve requests and provide information about products and services. Customer service is a required component of CRM, ensuring effective interactions and resolution for customers. Integrating service within CRM allows enterprises to manage and enhance post-sales interactions with customers by using existing tools to address customer inquiries, resolve issues and ensure overall customer satisfaction. Effective service is crucial for building long-term customer relationships and driving repeat business.

CRM service is about more than case tracking and trouble tickets. Many enterprises view service as an opportunity to solidify a positive customer relationship and perhaps enhance the loyalty and value of the customer. That has propelled interest in the emphasis on workflows and automation, particularly when it comes to managing self-service and field service, and the ability to provide agents with contextually relevant information during interactions.

Service within CRM facilitates efficient handling of customer support tickets so enterprises can accurately respond to inquiries and issues in a timely manner. Automated workflows and case management features help route issues to the appropriate support agents, streamlining the resolution process. Integrated knowledge bases within CRM platforms provide agents and customers with access to helpful resources such as FAQs and troubleshooting guides. This self-service approach enables customers to find solutions independently which then reduces the overall volume of support tickets.

Multichannel support can also be improved with CRM systems. Consistent and unified communication across email, phone, live chat and social media ensures a seamless customer experience. CRM service can also gain customer feedback through surveys and forms. This feedback helps identify areas for improvement and enables proactive measures to enhance service quality.

Managing and monitoring consumption and usage with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) ensures that support teams meet predefined response and resolution times, adherence to which builds customer trust and satisfaction. For industries requiring on-site service, field service management capabilities allow enterprises to schedule and dispatch service technicians. Real-time tracking and updates ensure efficient service delivery and improved customer satisfaction.

At its core, CRM service requires an agent desktop or mobile service where customer service is engaged and tracked. The agent desktop is similar to what is provided in contact center systems with additional support for digital channels and agent scheduling and can be more directly managed to performance targets. Supporting customer service agents with training and appropriate learning opportunities is critical and should be integrated with CRM and service systems.

Integrating service with CRM brings various benefits, including improved customer satisfaction through efficient and timely resolution of issues, increased efficiency through automated workflows, ticket routing and knowledge management, and enhanced insights through the analysis of support data and customer feedback. These insights enable proactive problem-solving over multiple channels through consistent and unified communication across all customer touchpoints. CRM tools also enable a proactive service approach through predictive analytics, allowing businesses to anticipate and address potential issues before they escalate.

Significant advancement in the use of AI to support customer service has evolved in recent years to more intelligently guide customer service agents to provide answers in a more immediate manner. By 2027, improvements in AI-based agent guidance will enable lower-skilled agents to handle harder problems, reducing overall labor costs. The evolution of customer self-service through generative AI (GenAI) and increased use of use natural language interactions with customers has already been made available by software providers.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for CRM Service evaluates software providers and products in key areas for customer interactions including defining and tracking interactions and supporting tickets across any channel of interactions, and the need to manage customer data in a secure and governed manner that can be access by customer service agents and their desktops that help resolve issues. CRM service should support business collaboration across enterprise, roles and preference needs, with analytics on interactions and agents available through dashboards and metrics. It should also support the analysis on the evolving use of AI and machine learning. The evaluation includes investments by the software provider in resources and improvements across product and customer experiences.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of CRM service as we define it: HubSpot, Microsoft, NetSuite, Oracle, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, SugarCRM, Zendesk and Zoho.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of CRM service software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating CRM service offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for CRM Service in 2024 finds Salesforce first on the list, followed by Oracle and HubSpot.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Salesforce
• Oracle
• HubSpot

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Oracle

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Salesforce, which has achieved this rating in seven of the seven categories.
• Oracle in six categories.
• HubSpot in five categories.
• SAP in two categories.
• Zoho in one category.
  

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle CRM service there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our CRM service blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.