Can CRM Analytics Help Make Better Marketing and Sales Decisions?

When we talk about CRM Analysis, we talk about a better CRM with analysis to make us smarter…

CRM (customer relationship management) is an informatics term for industries about methodologies, software, services, data integration and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way. CRM analysis is used to describe an automated methodology of processing data about a customer in order to make better business decisions. Companies compile so much data over time by keeping track of customers at every point in a life cycle and this becomes an important part of both the sales and servicing aspect of customer relations. CRM (customer relationship management) analytics comprises all programming that analyses data about an enterprise’s customers and presents it so that better and quicker business decisions can be made.

The world is adopting CRM analytics to confront application and data integration problems as well as the challenge of designing business logic into the analytical tools that operate on the data.

Many companies that venture into CRM analytics without having their data integration and management strategies aligned, need to restructure itself to effectively use the analysis. Many applications are particularly emphatic about making certain that Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are working properly before attempting to use the data with CRM analytic tools. The CRM layer becomes a giant magnifying glass of an ERP problem. Data integration is a critical first step before applying CRM analytics. That is why, customer analytics is considered to be a type of OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), a category of software tools that provides analysis of data stored in a database. It is also an important element of a CRM system.

CRM analytics can be considered a form of online analytical processing (OLAP) and may employ data mining. As Web sites have added a new and often faster way to interact with customers, the opportunity and the need to turn data collected about customers into useful information has become generally apparent. As a result, a number of software companies have developed products that do customer data analysis.

Benefits of CRM analytics are said to lead not only to better and more productive customer relations in terms of sales and service but also to improvement in supply chain management (lower inventory and speedier delivery) and thus lower costs and more competitive pricing. With a lot of study and application, we can conclude that with CRM analysis, we can –

• Gain better customer insights with data
• Improving ROI (Return On Investment) by leveraging data
• Effectively address the challenge of unstructured data

Apart of its success, one of the major challenges implicit in CRM analytics is how to integrate the analytical software with existing legacy systems as well as with other new systems.

Having a 360- degree picture of the customer is critical to staying ahead of the competition. Companies that are able to really listen to their customers and provide targeted offers and service based on each customer’s individual needs and preferences will definitely have an edge. Today’s customers are demanding and unpredictable and if companies have insights and knowledge about how best to satisfy them, they will be able to also strengthen customer loyalty, retain existing customers and attract new ones.

Related Articles:

The Advertising Industry Joins the Data Revolution

How Online Retailers can use Analytics

Retail Analytics