The most complete overview of the market for CRM systems and loyalty systems in 10 years

As participants in the market for business systems, including CRM and loyalty programs, we monitor the situation, study trends, communicate with vendors and customers. We also study the ratings of CRM systems and often notice that the indicators in them are different, and often almost the largest players are not taken into account in the studies. Apparently due to a conflict of interest.

Therefore, we decided to publish our own research of this market for the first time. It considered more than 3.4 thousand projects for the implementation of CRM systems and loyalty systems over the past 10 years in Russia.

This post will be of interest to business owners, analysts, executives and CIOs and anyone who studies, implements, or uses CRM systems. So, welcome under the cat.

To avoid misunderstanding, let’s define the terms:

The largest companies are companies included in the RAEKS-600 rating. Other companies are understood as those who are not included in this rating.

We call top systems systems from the following vendors: SAP, Oracle, SAS, Manzana, Microsoft, CFT, Salesforce, Terrasoft. If improvements and new products were made on the basis of top systems, then these implementations are carried out as systems based on top systems. The rest of the systems are referred to as other systems.

If the implementation of the project is announced in 2019-2020, then the record refers to current projects.

Main conclusions:

1. The overall demand for CRM solutions in 2020 was constant and high.

2. Top-3 industries in terms of implementation by the largest companies are finance, retail and telecom.

3. In 2020, the dynamics of demand for the largest and other companies is different. Demand from other companies is higher than last year’s indicators; from the largest companies, the demand for CRM systems is still stagnating. This is not typical since the first wave of coronavirus hit midsize and small companies more economically. It can be assumed that medium and medium-sized companies are more interested in accurate work with customers in an environment of increased competition and shrinking consumer finance, and the entry price for systems is not so high.

4. CRM is often implemented as a cloud service.

5. The leader in implementation is Terrasoft.

General dynamics

Considering projects for the period 2010-2020, we can note a large number of projects in 2011 and then two years of active implementations of CRM systems. The crisis partially reduced the number of projects in 2014 and 2015, however, on average for 2014-2019. there were about 250 implementations per year.

The number of projects in January-July this year is already 1.5 times more than in the same period last year. Based on the data for the period of the crisis in 2014 and the fact for 2020, we can expect that this year will not yield to the past, and the number of projects will at least not decrease or will be slightly higher than last year’s indicators.

The dynamics for the largest companies differs from the general trends. The largest companies also saw a surge in implementations in 2011, but not as large as across companies. And then we can note a smooth increase in the number of projects from 2012 to 2019. This year the number of projects falls short of the same indicators of last year and amounts to 65% of last year’s indicators. This applies to both top systems and others.

Sectoral distribution

The industry distribution differs depending on the size of the company. If for the largest companies the top 3 industries are finance, retail and telecom, then among other companies it is retail, IT and finance.

The sectoral distribution is logical and reflects both the structure of the largest companies and the demand for solutions by industry. The client is at the heart of the activities of any trading and financial company, which is why these areas are in the top of the industry, regardless of their size.

The largest companies do not include government agencies and only cover business, so this sector fell entirely into “other companies”.

largest companies	other companies
Financial services, investments and audit	Retail
Retail	Information Technology
Telecommunications and communications	Financial services, investments and audit
Metallurgical industry	Pharmaceuticals, medicine, healthcare
Insurance	Construction and building materials industry
Pharmaceuticals, medicine, healthcare	Telecommunications and communications
Transport	Entertainment industry, leisure, sports
Food industry	Logistics and distribution
Oil industry	State and social structures
Construction and building materials industry	Education and Science