New Datamonitor research predicts enormous growth in the mCRM market.
The pervasiveness of mobile devices like phones and PDAs, and the increasing bandwidth available to these devices, makes the wireless channel one that businesses, and consequently CRM vendors, cannot afford to ignore.
In 2001, the global mCRM market (B2E sales applications, B2E services applications, B2C applications), will be worth $118 million, compared to just $75 million in 2000. By 2005, its value will have increased to $1.7 billion. The growth will be driven by mCRM’s huge convenience advantage in enabling employees such as sales representatives, who are out of the office or depot most of the time, to update customer information from anywhere.
Investment in sales applications will remain the most popular area for the next five years, both because it generates the highest returns and because sales departments tend to have significant political force in companies. B2E sales applications currently account for 52% of total global mCRM investment, rising to 56% in 2005.
B2E service applications, for service representatives such as the employees of utilities, currently account for 41% of mCRM revenues, but this will shrink to just 23% by 2005. Despite mCRM’s obvious advantages in this area, worries over the viability of mCommerce and the general state of telecoms and technology stocks will constrain growth.
While B2E applications will still dominate the market, the B2C space will be the fastest growing over the next five years. Location-based services and local wireless networks such as Bluetooth will enable companies to market to and service their customers in a more personalized way, helping them to move ever closer to the holy grail of ‘one-to-one’ customer relationships.
mCommerce and mCRM are still very much in their infancy. The real promise of mCommerce, especially in the B2C space, still lies in the future when 3G networks become more widespread and mobile devices become more intelligent. As mCommerce becomes more of a reality, the market for business to customer (B2C) applications will really begin to take off.
