Analytical CRM: The fuel to power your business

With the internet proving to be a hotbed for all kinds of marketing plans, there is an immense need for companies to understand the pulse of their customers to determine their marketing mix. To cull out the right information on the pulse of their customers, the core factor they most need is information. Analytical Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to a mechanism that offers this information. As the name suggests, Analytical CRM is a mechanism that allows the procurement and analysis of customer data. It is a dynamic customer management tool, and is effective when it comes to assisting, planning and executing marketing plans.

What does Analytical CRM do? Simply put, it looks at the decision-making surrounding products and services produced, evaluates the pricing and development of new products. In a nutshell, it:

• looks at exactly what the customer needs,
• in order to encourage an organisation to respond directly to those needs,
• to effectively optimise business.

Analytical CRM uses predictive analysis as the basis of its functioning, allowing the organisation to channel its efforts effectively across the customer demographic.1 In the process, it helps analyse the demand for products, explains the potential for high demand and the kind of consumer habits that prevail, and on the flipside, the possibility of a loss of customers or inability to gain new ones. The steps in the process are as follows:

• Data is collected at every stage of the customer lifecycle to determine the customer’s behaviour.
• After collecting all the relevant data, the next step is to determine, develop and analyse rules and methods to be used to scale and optimise the understanding of the customer demographic, and to resolve relevant questions for the business undertaking.
• In the next step, efforts are made to implement or deploy results to enhance the efficiency of the system and all the processes involved.
• Lastly, the information in the form of the values of customers so derived will be combined and integrated with the strategic marketing policies of the organisation. It is at this stage that the strategy is immensely useful.