Many readers of business news have certainly witnessed the growing trend of enterprises focusing more on their relationships with customers. Gone are the days when they could hide behind ignorance and of not being able to know their customers through and through. Now, customer relationship management systems are able to use silos of data containing call histories and personally identifiable information to make support calls more personal, quick, and effective.

This is basis of the findings in recent research published by MarketsandMarkets. Titled "Service Quality Management (SQM) and Telco Customer Experience Management (CEM) Market by Product Type (EFM, Web Analytics, Text Analytics, Speech Analytics) & Provider Type (ISP, TSP, MSP) - Global Advancements, Worldwide Forecasts & Analysis (2014-2019)," the research suggests that competition across vertical markets has forced companies to adopt CRM and maintain their customer relationships with as much effort as they put into their products. Customers are demanding a personal touch, and companies that do not provide that touch are left wanting.

The report description says that using CRM is part of a "customer-centric approach" that involves relationships between customers and their chosen brands, and customers are often the ones driving such relationships. Instead of bowing to the traditional call center approach of only providing phone-based voice services, customers have demanded attention through video chat, text messaging, and social media. They are forcing companies to adopt a so-called "omni-channel" support structure, and CRM is having to advance alongside that structure.

Businesses such as Adobe (News - Alert) Systems, Amdocs, and Cisco are focusing on customers' experiences. Therefore, they are creating the separate field of customer experience management, which is part of CRM, and takes a hard look at how customers are interacting with their chosen support channels. It is not enough, for instance, for businesses to create texting services that they can use to reach customers; businesses must also analyze how those services work. And analytics that attempt to describe the depth and satisfaction customers experience while in texting services, now called customer experience analytics, can show businesses how to make their structures even better.

Adobe has reportedly placed 20 percent of its revenue into research and development for experience management. Amdocs (News - Alert) is reaching out to business with the Amdocs 9.1 software that helps organizations develop multi-channel support. Furthermore, Cisco is showing that experience management can be conducted in the cloud by focusing on products that operate in that arena.

The latest MarketsandMarkets report focuses on CRM, CEM, and the analytics that support those key business areas. It takes a look at products and services provided by the companies mentioned above as well as Egain Corporation, Ericsson, HP, IBM, Nokia Siemens (News - Alert) Network, and Oracle, and it mentions the aspects of the market that are driving adoption of different technologies, the challenges for companies developing customer experience tools, and speculates on the future of the market by addressing opportunities available for market expansion.