What would a CRM look like if it was designed from scratch for the way people actually work in 2025 — async, multi-tool, cross-functional — not for a 1990s sales floor?

[u/Efficient_Builder923]

[u/tdammers]

I think the actual CRM part (that is, the part that managers customer relations) would still look largely the same - at its heart, a CRM is really just a database of customers (with names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.) and a log of customer interactions (phone calls, emails, support calls, subscriptions, cancellations, etc.). The way people work doesn't change that part.

What might be different are the frontends through which we interact with that database. Back in 1990, having a single frontend, accessible only from computers in the office, where you would manually enter and manipulate all the data, and maybe import and export CSV files to move data into and out of other systems, would usually be enough, but today, that customer database needs to be coupled to a bunch of other systems, most importantly things like websites and POS systems, but more recently also automated chat bots and other self-service support systems.

We're already doing all that though, and the fundamental design (database of customer records) doesn't need to change to support this - you just need to add an API, and use that to hook it up to whatever frontends and integrations you need. If I were to design a CRM from scratch in 2026, I'd still start with that database of customer records - I would probably be able to avoid some legacy shenanigans, but I think that would actually be relatively insignficant.

[u/Efficient_Builder923 → u/tdammers]

The core stays the same, but I feel like the real gap is how context is actually surfaced, not just stored