Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, expanded a small farmhouse to a 160-room mansion in California in the 1880s. It became known as the Winchester Mystery House.

She continuously added on to her house for 36 years. She rebuilt a seven-story tower 16 times. The house became a maze. There are walled-off exterior windows and doors that weren’t removed as the house grew in size, hallways that lead to nowhere, and an indoor garden with slanted floors that carries water to an outdoor garden.

What does this have to do with customer relationship management (CRM) software?

Over the last 20 years, CRM software has become overengineered, and complexity is killing its value.

When working on The Forrester Wave™: Customer Relationship Management Software, Q1 2025, I heard over and over again from marquee customers that they struggle to keep up with the tsunami of new features that vendors roll out every year. They struggle with the fear of missing out and spend countless cycles understanding what this new innovation means for them. More and more features does not make the product better. More is often worse.

I heard that customers struggle to understand how to best deploy CRM and drive adoption for their front-office employees and that they likewise struggle to make sense of price lists that are sometimes 100 pages long and that contain different license tiers, add-ons, and marketplace extensions. I also heard that they struggle to make sense of the new AI features, which add another layer of complexity and business decisions around their use.

The CRM Market Is At A Point Of Reckoning

Like the Winchester Mystery House, our old notion of CRM must be torn down and rebuilt with AI at the core of these products. AI will streamline the purchase, deployment, and value realization of CRM software. Also, CRM vendors must have a clear point of view on how they want their customers to use their products. For example, CRM software must be:

  • Easy to buy. It must have well-defined product tiers with AI at every tier, a clear focus on the value of add-ons, and transparent, consumption-based pricing.
  • Easy to deploy. Deployment costs can’t be many more times more expensive than software license costs. It must offer low-code tooling to let business users take greater control, along with curated marketplaces — and more.
  • Easy to use. It must have a simple user experience that masks product complexities, that has a point of view on how a task should be accomplished, and that nudges and guides users to the right outcome.
  • Easy to learn. Like online gaming, users must be able to learn as they use the product.

CRM software must have AI at its foundation, not as a bolt-on feature. Vendors must have robust AI privacy, security, and governance practices. And vendors must guide their customers on how to start and further mature their AI adoption journey at scale, as well as how to quantify its value at every adoption step. This will be even more important as we move into an AI agent world.

The market is moving in this direction. Read The Forrester Wave™: Customer Relationship Management Software, Q1 2025. Connect with me to talk about what you are seeing in the space.