What are the key trends that CRM trends that business and IT professionals need to pay attention to in setting their plans during 2012? Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report that spotlights our latest research and recommendations for how to compete in The Age of the Customer will be published in late January.

1. Customer experience management will move beyond aspiration to strategy. More organizations will move beyond empty goals like becoming “customer-obsessed” to define clear and actionable customer experience strategies. The strategy must meet three tests: 1) It defines the intended experience; 2) it directs employee activities and decision-making; and 3) it guides funding decisions and project prioritization.

2. Brands will embrace the experience ecosystem. Firms will move to break free from their organizational silos, invest in understanding customer moments of truth through journey-mapping, and embrace the concept of the “customer experience ecosystem” — one that considers the influence of every single employee and external partner on every single customer interaction.

3. Experience management will emerge as a management discipline. There is increasing acceptance of the idea that customer experience management can be thought of as a discipline — a set of sound, repeatable practices such as those are defined in Forrester’s Customer Experience Maturity Framework.

The acquisition of RightNow by Oracle makes sense for both companies’ CRM solutions strategies. Oracle wants to beef up its overall “cloud” portfolio. This is a strength of RightNow, one of the pioneers of the SaaS deployment model. It also needs a stronger play in the customer service sector — an area that salesforce.com targeted several years ago. This is the core domain strength of RightNow.

RightNow has had good success, posting strong growth over the last several years — but a $250 million software company found itself at an awkward size to compete against giants like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft.

The big risk to this deal is that the corporate cultures of Oracle and RightNow could not be more different. Oracle’s bare-knuckle approach to sales and how it treats customers is the complete opposite of RightNow’s ethos of client centricity and flexibility.

Many clients that have chosen RightNow may not be happy to hear that Oracle is their new software supplier for customer service. And the employees at RightNow are likely to find working for Oracle an unpleasant contrast to Montana-based RightNow’s corporate ethos.

Better customer experience drives improvement for three types of customer loyalty: willingness to consider another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague. But how does that affect a company’s bottom line? Our models estimate that the revenue impact from a 10 percentage-point improvement in a company’s performance, as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CxPi) score, could be in excess of $1 billion.

My colleague at Forrester, Megan Burns, spotlights in her research how companies are using best practices to improve their CxPi score and capture untapped revenue growth opportunities:

• Create or enhance voice of the customer programs. Voice of the customer (VoC) programs help companies understand what customers want from their interactions and how customers think that current interactions stack up.
• Implement customer-centric design processes. Too often, customer interactions are designed to meet business needs or are based on incorrect assumptions about what customers want. Customer-centric design processes solve that problem by putting well-researched information about customers into the right hands at the right point in the design cycle.

Josh Bernoff, one of Forrester’s leading analysts, spotlights in a new report that we have now entered the age of the customer.  Empowered customers are disrupting every industry; competitive barriers like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can’t save you. In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers. The successful companies will be customer-obsessed, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon.com. Executives in customer-obsessed companies must pull budget dollars from areas that traditionally created dominance — brand advertising, distribution lockup, mergers for scale, and supplier relationships — and invest in four priority areas: 1) real-time customer intelligence; 2) customer experience and customer service; 3) sales channels that deliver customer intelligence; and 4) useful content and interactive marketing. Those that master the customer data flow and improve frontline customer staff will have the edge.

One trend in the CRM industry that is hot, hot, hot is mobile CRM. Mobile CRM solutions — the ability to use handheld devices to manage sales, sales contacts, and customer service activities — have clearly moved beyond their previous status as a specialized nice-to-have option and into the mainstream. Organizations are also rushing to find new ways to allow their customers to interact with them using consumer-owned mobile devices.

The emergence of ubiquitous high-speed broadband connectivity, smartphones, and tablet devices with enormous computing power and longer battery life, along with increased employee adoption of touchscreen devices (iPhone/iPad/BlackBerry) in every sphere of life, are all trends that serve to “liberate IT from the desktop.”

I am currently midway through a major research cycle on the topic, talking with CRM vendors, systems integrators, and end users. My goal is to define mobile CRM best practices and spotlight the pitfalls that can get in way of capitalizing on the mobile technology revolution.

I recently talked with Model Metrics, Wipro’s CRM consulting practice leaders, and Tata Consultancy Services’ CRM practice leadership team. These consulting and development firms are all doing a lot of mobile CRM projects for their clients. We brainstormed about the critical considerations that that must be addressed when defining a mobile CRM strategy:

• Who are the intended users and targeted business community for mobile app use?