What’s a Modern CRM? A Guide to Modern CRMs in 2025
Updated on
December 23, 2024
6 min read
CRMs are indispensable tools for modern businesses to effectively manage customer relations, streamline their business operations and help them keep up with evolving market requirements. Yet, many organizations are still burdened by legacy CRMs, rigid, hard to customize and costly to maintain systems that often hinder growth and fail to deliver the flexibility and efficiency modern businesses require.
Modern businesses need modern CRM solutions, designed to be agile, adaptable, and easy to customize for non-technical users. From no-code customization to AI-powered insights and seamless integrations, modern CRMs provide businesses with the tools they need to drive growth in 2025 and beyond.
In this guide we explore what makes a CRM truly modern and how it impacts business efficiency and growth.
What Makes a CRM Modern?
A modern CRM is a software designed to adapt to changing business needs, offering no-code, composable architecture with embedded AI capabilities. It helps businesses manage and streamline all revenue-related processes across the entire customer lifecycle, empowering non-technical users to own their automation.
Modern CRM allows non-technical users to build and customize workflows, processes, and interfaces with ready-to-use components, making adjustments quick, easy and cost-effective. Thanks to the no-code approach, businesses can reduce dependency on IT support, accelerate implementation time, and reduce the costs of maintaining the system.
Modern CRM softwares seamlessly integrates AI features, including predictive, agentic, and generative AI to enhance business automation and informed decision-making. Additionally, modern CRMs are built to seamlessly scale with growing businesses, ensuring that the system can support evolving business needs.
Modern CRM vs Legacy CRM
Legacy CRMs are monolithic software packages designed to handle specific functions with a one-size fits all approach. They are rigid, complex, and disconnected which often results in inefficiencies, and user frustration.
Legacy CRMs require significant IT support to implement and adapt to evolving business needs, which make customization costly and time-consuming. The full implementation of a legacy system can take from a couple of months, up to even a year, because each new feature or upgrade, has to be coded by hand. Additionally, legacy CRMs’ interfaces are complex and require significant technical expertise, which limits their usability and adoption by business users.
| CRM model | Modern CRM | Legacy CRM |
| Architecture | Composable, unified architecture with AI at its core. | Rigid, over engineered technologies with AI as an addition and not an integral part of the system |
| Customization | No-code tools allow quick and easy customization by non-technical users | Customization requires significant IT effort, and extensive coding, making it a costly and time consuming process |
User experience
| Intuitive, user-friendly interfaces designed for ease of adoption | Outdated, complex interfaces with steep learning curves that require technical expertise |
| Scalability | Seamlessly scales with evolving business needs | Scaling often involves costly upgrades or replacements |
| Implementation time | Instant deployment with no-code tools; deployment in days | Long and heavy deployment; deployment takes month or even years |
| Costs of ownership | Lower costs due to quicker deployment and minimal IT dependency | High costs of maintenance, updates, and customization |
| Integration | Easily integrates with third-party apps and APIs | Limited integration capabilities, often requiring additional middleware |
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Features of Modern CRM
Modern CRM platforms are equipped with advanced features that streamline business processes, improve customer engagement, and drive growth.
Here are the key modern CRM features:
1. No-code development
Modern CRMs allow business users to customize workflows, automate tasks, and design user interfaces with visual elements, drag-and-drop tools, and pre-built templates. This empowers teams to adapt the platform to unique business needs, reducing reliance on IT support and speeding up deployment.
2. End-to-end workflow automation
Modern CRM provides end-to-end business process automation to streamline operations and reduce manual tasks, including data entry, follow-ups, and reporting. Modern CRMs allow users to create complex workflows with pre-built templates, preconfigured business rules, and AI-driven process generation, which facilitates and speeds up the process.
3. Predictive analytics
Artificial intelligence enhances modern CRMs capabilities with predictive analytics, lead scoring, sales forecasting, and sentiment analysis. These features enable businesses to anticipate customer needs, identify opportunities, and make data-driven decisions.
4. Omnichannel communication
A modern CRM enables communication across email, chat, social media, text messages, and phone calls from a single platform. This ensures no interaction falls through the cracks, helping customer-facing teams deliver seamless customer experiences across all channels.
5. 360-degree customer view
Modern CRM software gathers data from multiple sources and provides full visibility into the customer’s profile, history of interactions, preferences, and AI/ML-generated insights to help businesses deliver personalized customer experiences.
6. Real-time analytics and reporting
With interactive custom dashboards and detailed reporting, modern CRMs provide real-time insights into key business metrics including sales performance, customer satisfaction, and marketing campaign effectiveness.
7. Integration capabilities
CRMs provide pre-built integrations with other tools and applications, such as ERP systems, marketing automation software, and e-commerce platforms. Additionally, they support custom integrations through APIs, enabling businesses to connect unique systems. This creates a connected ecosystem that improves data flow and operational efficiency.
8. Mobile access
Modern CRM solutions usually provide mobile applications that help field teams, sales reps, and service agents access critical information and manage tasks on the go.
9. Enhanced security and compliance
Modern CRMs prioritize data security with end-to-end encryption, role-based and user-based access controls, and multifactor authentication. It also enhances compliance with industry regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, etc., ensuring regulatory adherence.
10. Sales, marketing and customer service-specific features
Modern CRM solutions provide multiple features designed to enhance sales, marketing and customer service teams operations.
For sales professionals, modern CRM offers features that help them streamline their pipelines, and close more deals, including lead and opportunity management, sales forecasting, sales performance analysis, etc. Marketing professionals can benefit from modern CRM features such as campaign management, email marketing, event management, and digital ads. For customer service reps, modern CRM solutions provide capabilities for case management, field service, automatic ticket routing, etc.
AI in Modern CRM
Some modern CRMs, like CRM Creatio, provide advanced AI capabilities embedded directly into the software. These CRMs provide capabilities to enhance all customer-facing operations, including AI for sales, AI for customer service, and AI for marketing.
At the core of Creatio modern CRM lies AI architecture that empowers organizations with intelligent business automation by bringing together predictive, generative, and agentic AI.
Predictive AI provides deep insights and recommendations, including next best action, next best step, etc., which are based on through data analysis to help users make more informed decisions about their business operations. Predictive AI enhances features such as sales forecasting to provide accurate revenue forecasts, lead scoring to efficiently identify the most promising opportunities, and churn prediction to identify clients at risk and provide insights on how to retain them.
Agentic AI serves as a virtual assistant, streamlining workflows and enhancing employees’ productivity. It automates and autonomously executes repetitive tasks such as updating records, sending follow-up reminders, scheduling meetings, etc., based on triggers and conditions predefined by users. It can also analyze customer behavior and preferences to recommend personalized actions, such as sending tailored product suggestions, or timely follow-up to improve customer engagement and satisfaction. Agentic AIcan also serve as a customer support assistant, providing instant responses to common customer inquiries through chatbots, improving the response time.
Generative AI allows users to automatically create new content, including emails, response messages, meeting summaries, etc. By analysing customer data, generative AI can prepare personalized, relevant and engaging messages that resonate with prospects and clients.
Creatio provides also AI skills - specific capabilities that enable intelligent automation, such as workflow execution, and data analysis. These skills can be easily configured and customized by non-technical users to adapt to a variety of business use cases.
Example of a Modern CRM - CRM Creatio
Creatio modern CRM is an AI-native, no-code CRM and workflow automation tool designed to support sales, marketing, and customer service teams. Creatio automates end-to-end customer journey with a maximum degree of freedom, streamlines processes of any complexity, and enhances efficiency of all business operations.
Creatio’s composable no-code architecture, user-friendly interface and drag-and drop tools empower non-technical users to customize the solution to their unique business needs, minimizing reliance on IT resources. With these no-code capabilities, businesses can accelerate the implementation and customization, cutting the timeline from months to just a few days.
CRM Creatio provides powerful unified AI capabilities across predictive, generative, and agentic AI use cases to empower businesses with intelligent automation, and real-time insights. Thanks to robust data analytics and reporting capabilities, Creatio helps organizations make more informed business decisions and improve their processes.
Creatio integrates with over 700 third-party tools and applications to ensure seamless data flow and streamline workflows across the entire business ecosystem. It also provides robust security features including end-to-end encryption, and multi-factor authentications, and helps businesses adhere to industry regulations including GDPR, and HIPAA.
CRM Creatio provides robust features to support customer-facing teams in their daily operations, including 360 view of customer data, lead and opportunity management, intelligent case management, email marketing campaign management, and more. It also provides industry-specific workflows for multiple industries including banking, pharma, transportation, and insurance to streamline the workflow creation and customization process.
Creatio stands out as a modern CRM by combining no-code flexibility, AI-driven capabilities, and extensive integration options to meet the unique needs of any business. Its user-friendly platform empowers organizations to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and adapt quickly to changing business needs, making it an ideal choice for organizations seeking a future-ready CRM solution.
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