How do businesses leverage their Analytical CRM?

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