Gartner has lately highlighted a number of technology trends CRM professionals should pay attention to as they plan their CRM architecture.  Social CRM initiatives are among those trends. Gartner predicts spending on such social CRM initiatives as customer communities and social media monitoring to grow up to 10% of spending in 2020.

What will this mean for traditional vendors? They will have to implement social capabilities into operational CRM. By social capabilities meant three areas: internal collaboration tools, internal communities hosted by the business, and outside social networks monitoring.  However, there is a resistance to social CRM initiatives coming from legal departments whose main concern is the level of corporate governance.

Among another trends that will impact CRM Gartner also named:

Turning to cloud computing to decrease operational costs;

Corporate performance management (CPM) including includes data-driven planning, budgeting and forecasting activities often includes sales and marketing analytics;

Web-oriented architectures which are not yet applicable in a majority of cases in complex enterprise applications, but will be soon, according to experts.