The state of the CRM landscape
Elevating experiences and forging tighter customer relationships continues to be a driving force for business, especially with increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). Yet many existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems fall short solving the real challenges of delivering great experiences and resolving customer issues.
Even the latest copilot AI approach to CRM has done little to advance utility beyond tracking customer activity and capturing interactions. While delivering incrementally better search capabilities, this first wave of AI CRM deployments has yet to show measurable business value.
Clearly, throwing AI on top of legacy CRM isn’t the fix. What’s needed is a workflow foundation that orchestrates coordinated, end-to-end action for self-service customer experiences and agentic-powered automation. Without a workflow engine at the core, sales and customer service reps spend too much time swiveling between systems, hampering opportunities to resolve customer issues, close deals, and deliver on specific business goals.
Legacy CRM’s inability to seamlessly connect data and workflows across customer touchpoints—and to support a holistic sales and service life cycle—has negative ramifications for customers and sales and service teams alike:
Customer service agents waste hours in search of answers, bogged down as they switch between systems, manually pore over documentation, and navigate the approval process.
Sales reps are mired in data entry tasks, forced to utilize systems not designed to facilitate complex quotes/configuration, identify cross-sell opportunities, or handle the complexities of subscription-based sales models.
Customers can’t find the answers when there’s a problem and are frustrated with slow issue resolution. When they are ready to make a purchase, it takes forever to get a quote. This disconnect fuels discontent and compromises brand loyalty.
Field service technicians regularly show up on site without the right parts or documentation to complete a job. This causes delays and creates disgruntled customers.
The limitations of legacy CRM are a drag on business performance and ultimately affect the bottom-line.
Sales teams spend the bulk of their day manually chasing down information and waiting on approvals with only 10 hours a week actually devoted to selling, according to a 2024 report. What’s more, the report found most teams are spending that time on “tedious, time-consuming tasks” that take away from selling goods and services.
At the same time, in 2025, customer experience (CX) quality for the US, as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™), fell to a new average low of 68.3 (on a 100-point scale). The rating has decreased for four consecutive years, the report says and ranks three main dimensions: effectiveness, ease, and emotion.
It is clear companies need to make radical changes to their CRM strategies to foster new AI-driven workflows and experiences that nurture better customer connections and carve out competitive edge. “The application of AI on top of legacy CRM is falling short because there is no set of rules and regulations governing how to use the data or signal what’s important,” says Eric Bensley, global product marketing leader for ServiceNow.
