Analytical CRM: The fuel to power your business

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November 3, 2023Leave a comment

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.

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How analytical CRM can power your business

Monday.com

October 9, 2023Leave a comment

Analytical CRM: The fuel to power your business

This article explains the primary basis of Analytical CRM, and explains how it can effectively help power a business endeavour by augmenting its marketing capabilities.

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.

The steps in the process are as follows:

  • Data is collected at every stage of the customer life cycle to determine the customer’s behavior.
  • 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.

“Analytical CRM” – http://www.managementstudyguide.com/analytical-crm.htm

Analytical CRM can really be the wind beneath the sails of any business endeavor For starters, it helps you segment your customers by dividing them into groups of those who are likely to use your products and those who aren’t. In doing so, it enables an organisation to market individually and directly to a customer based on the data so gained. Secondly, it also helps you understand your customers and their behavior. With the help of the tool, an organisation will be easily capable of identifying which customers are most profitable and which ones aren’t, and which ones are potential clients and which aren’t.

Effectively, the use of Analytical CRM tools can be immensely rewarding for an organisation’s business. All it takes is to stay tuned to the customer’s wants and needs. With that, the marketing mix can be maneuvered neatly to earn the organisation profits.

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Customer Listening and Responsive Marketing

June 25, 2023Leave a comment

A finger on the pulse

So you have a brilliant product. You want to price it a certain way. Your customers like your product, but don’t like your pricing ideas. They stop buying your product, and you’re looking into space with a sad, puppy dog face. Not good, not good. Here’s all that you should know when you’re dealing with a situation like this!

The first thing you should know about your end user is that he has an attention span that is much longer than that of the average cocker-spaniel. Which means, therefore, your customer is a receptive body to information, and is always discerning of ways to help him access the best of products without making a black hole out of his pocket.

As an organisation with something to sell, how do you capitalise on that attentiveness and pivot it to your advantage? Simple. Customer listening and Responsive marketing is all you need. The name says it all: it just involves keeping an eye out for what’s happening out there, and gauging your customer’s needs. The moment your customer frowns, you’ll know what to do.

Puzzled? Stick with me. I’m going to tell you a story. Heard of these guys called Uber? They go by the tagline “Everyone’s private taxi”. They got up to some interesting stuff, running this really lucrative business of having taxis to ferry people from their doorstep to the airport.

This was a very comfortable scheme of things for those that used the service: imagine, great service, fancy cars and a ride to the airport, all at normal rates! (I might have said that that’s the Indian dream, but that’s changed after these elections, and we’ll talk about that later over some chai and pakoras. See what I did there?). Chennai adopted this awesome scheme of things, and for a while, there were many happy people in the city.

Uber got famous, had more clients hopping on and off their vehicles while staying put on their bandwagon in the hope of getting the best out of fancy cars at reasonable rates. Then came the deal breaker: Uber’s success made it feel that a change was in order, one that resulted in the fixing of an arbitrary rate. The average ride to the airport now became Rs. 1200. Not a cool rate, no matter how fancy a car! Consequently, people were not happy about it at all. A bunch of angry users does to a business what a bunch of ants do to a tiny square of sugar: they destroy it.

Uber then decided to undo its mistake, and swooped in to fix it.

Let’s take a moment and reflect on this. What Uber did is not just a band-aid solution, but a clear cut example of customer listening and responsive marketing. All that Uber did was to look at the impact its decisions had on its customers, to listen to what its customers had to say and watch what they had to do in response to its policies, and then, to pivot those policies accordingly to ensure maximum usership.

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How do businesses leverage their Analytical CRM?

May 8, 2023Leave a comment

Different from operational CRM, Analytical CRM refers to customer centric analysis that takes place in organizational back-offices. Companies must be able to understand customer behaviour, reason for a particular action, the intention etc. and ACRM is what helps them with this procedure. In today’s market, ACRM aids in decision making by understanding specific patterns in consumer behaviour and information that have been gathered by different operational CRM systems.

Although there are many benefits attached to ACRM, it is necessary to keep in mind, a few areas that may help leverage it.

1. Convergance and integration: A company wide analytics solution which integrates ACRM and traditional BI solutions should be the ultimate destination in the marketplace. Usually the entire customer experience is broken down into components and assigned to different departments or lines of businesses which leads to challenges in integration. Systems and processes must be in place so as to collect and converge customer data from various channels into a centralized database.

2. Speech-Text analytical solution: Vendors across the globe are providing companies with platforms for speech analytics solutions by joining forces with text analytics solutions so as to deliver more robust and rich platforms that can integrate with a unified repository.

3. Predictive analysis: Predictive analysis is one of the keys to a successful ACRM program. Integrating this helps companies make long term decisions based on actual customer behaviour and trending data. Although it is an expensive affair ( around 10% or lesser number of companies use predictive analysis today), forecasting capabilites enable organizations align future direction based on actual data which proves to be very helpful.

4. Reporting: In today’s world, new visual applications such as dashboards, 2-D and 3-D visualtisations have replaced traditional methods such as raw data, statistics etc. Rather than having text and number heavy information, these modern tools enable users to grasp information and the context behind it, a lot better and quicker. Establishing a heirarchy of needs for loyalty programs and presenting data such that it is relevant to stakeholders is what companies should aim at.

Though these areas provide a business with a rough outline on how ACRM could be leveraged, it depends on the company and the kind of relationship they share with their customer base to get data which could help enhance their analytics.

References:

http://www.managementstudyguide.com/analytical-crm.htm

http://www.tgc.com/dsstar/01/1127/103729.html#top

http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/CRM-analytics

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Why Do Brands Need Customer Relationship Management?

April 30, 2023Leave a comment

Gone are the days when branding meant adding your customer’s first name to a personalized marketing communication. Nowadays, customers demand more!

If customers feel like they are being targeted with content that is valuable to them, they are more likely to buy from a brand and establish a long-term relationship. That is exactly what every brand wants!

Companies are aware their brand makes them a household name, but is that brand being used to its fullest customer advantage? Are you doing everything you can to maximize profits from those customers? Brands are important tools attracting customers to purchase. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) plays a significant part in helping you build your brand equity.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) increases your customer’s awareness towards your brand, brand association, and most important – brand loyalty.

The key to enabling companies to differentiate themselves and build their brand in a more effective way through more personalized marketing campaigns is by using an effective Customer Relationship Management solution.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution gives you the ability to understand product and services demand, to weed out unprofitable sales efforts and customers, to capitalize on emerging trends, and to market more intelligently.

A well implemented CRM application will bring together multiple sources of information to support decision-making, allowing marketing campaigns to be targeted and managed most effectively. It will act as a sales force’s compass. It will help the organization understand where it stands today, and point in the direction it needs to take. It will be an integral part of the sales team – at the start of the sales cycle it will help qualify leads, allowing resources to be directed appropriately.

It’s commonly known that it’s significantly cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. So it makes sense to focus resources that help to build customer loyalty, increase spend and encourage longevity. CRM allows you to analyze customer spend, joining up your marketing and sales processes. Additionally, you can build detailed customer profiles – all of which aids the reduction of customer churn. CRM can help make service improvements whilst reducing costs associated with managing customers, both by making agents more effective, and by automating data entry processes.

Here are some points about why you should consider implementing a CRM solution: Improved Organization Performance and Productivity: the centralization of data results in faster customer service, improved data accuracy and the ability to quickly and easily access and share information to boost your productivity.

Improve Decision Making Through Better Client Knowledge: have a sharper competitive edge, enabling you to sell more effectively and attract new customers.

Any time Information Access: the web access option gives mobile employees instant access to the centralized data to support all their activities to improve their time efficiency while also being more prepared and knowledgeable when interacting with your clients.

Improve Client Profitability: have the information to create and sustain individual client relationships and boost client satisfaction to maximize profits. A CRM system can also help you identify and market to your most profitable customers. This approach allows you to increase your marketing efficiency while reducing the cost.

Store, Report and Analyze Customer Feedback: including quality control and evaluation results, to ensure a prompt reaction to any scenario that may arise.

Better Management Information: parameter driven reports, history tables, instant data field creation for the information you didn’t know you needed yesterday.

Enhanced Quality Checking: including a range of built-in features, such as the Automatic Version to check if you are working from the latest version and full audits of all actions between your organization(s) and your client.

Minimize Delays: you can start using and benefiting from the powerful features of a CRM solution immediately, with migration of your current data and virtually no disruption to your everyday operations, you can carry on doing what you do best.

Improved Organization Performance and Productivity – the centralization of data results in faster customer service, improved data accuracy and the ability to quickly and easily access and share information to boost your productivity Organizations must keep focused on their strategy and find ways to achieve more with less. Tools which help companies maximize revenue opportunities and reduce operational costs will strengthen the organization and position it well for a secure future. CRM is one such powerful tool which, if fully harnessed, can play a vital role in sales, marketing and service provision.

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5 Tips for choosing the Right CRM Solution

July 29, 2013Leave a comment

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution helps organizations deepen relationships with existing customers and build relationships with new customers (and prospects) by organizing and synchronizing business functions and processes.

5 Tips for choosing the Right CRM Solution

Here are a few pointers to try and help you choose the right CRM implementation for your organization:

1. Determine your needs

CRM solutions come in a range of capabilities and costs. There are many competent, reasonably priced ones that are ideal for small organizations while the “big brand” solutions boast of capabilities that stretch across borders, functions and vast amounts of data. Before you choose a CRM solution, it is, therefore important to assess both your current and future needs.

If you are only looking at managing basic customer data and tracking sales activity and generating reports based on the above, an inexpensive solution may do. Some of the more expensive CRM systems may also be available as “stripped-down” versions at a lower cost. Such systems also provide fast-growing organizations with the scalability required to match their needs.

The solution you opt for should, therefore, be based on a proper assessment of your current and future needs.

2. Integration of legacy data

Your organization may have accumulated substantial amounts of data relating to customers and prospects over the years in different formats. The CRM solution that you are planning to implement should be compatible with the format(s) your current data is in. You can then work on historical and current data and perform analyses over the entire period your organization has been in existence.

3. Training and Support

Make sure that the CRM vendor you’re considering provides adequate round-the-clock, technical and troubleshooting support. And, if your CRM vendor also includes adequate training and certification for your staff within the package price, it is a definite plus.

Free CRM solutions mostly do not offer such training and support services; so, if you are considering a free CRM you may have to weigh-up the cost savings against the lack of training and support before deciding on implementation.

4. e-Capabilities

If you are an online retailer or an organization whose Internet or social media dependencies are extensive, you would require a CRM that can work well online and help you track interactions on your social media pages.

5. Compare

Now that you have a fairly detailed idea of the criteria that needs to be fulfilled by your CRM, it’s time to start checking out vendors. In addition to the above criteria, you can also compare vendors based on track record, customer service, price etc.

Your budget will also be the deciding factor in buying a CRM solution. Even if you do not have budgetary constraints it does not mean that you should go for an expensive implementation if it’s features are beyond your needs.

 

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