BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

BUSINESS   INTELLIGENCE   IN

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Business intelligence in CRM

BI in CRM can play an important part in helping the business to attract and retain their customers, as customer service and customer satisfaction are the backbone of customer relationships. In effort to ensure customer satisfaction and retention, business spend a lot time trying to understand buying behavior, customer expectations for product support, website support and service variety (service offerings).

BI in CRM is crucial to business success. Competitors have already embraced metrics and KPI (key performance indicator) for customer relationship management to provide objective metrics and understand what tasks and activities support goals, and where the business needs to refocus.

CRM is a business strategy that identifies the customer as a very important business asset. It recognizes that customers are unique and need to be treated as uniquely as possible. It recognizes customer satisfaction as important only as a determinant of managing churn and future revenue potential, Information is critical in such a strategy and can only come about through the analysis of data. Smart use and analysis of data makes business intelligence. So, business intelligence is a broad category which includes many uses of data, one of which is in pursuit of a CRM strategy.

Key notes:

Once the CRM application is aligned with BI, it becomes part of the business strategy. Every report has intelligence embedded within provided the input data is clean and appropriately consolidated. If the CRM application data is not optimized to the level required by the BI system it could pose a problem, as the business comes to believe that the BI system is not effective.

• To avoid such scenario and uncompromising procedures to consolidate the multiple databases in the CRM application :

         

        Initiating better data practices in the organization beginning with the process of data collection. Many organizations present a multi-page data form for new customers to fill up, and this is invariably incorrectly or partially completed due to the tedium involved. Instead, data could be gradually collected over a period of time using innovative means. For instance, call center personnel could call to check if the customer is happy with the services provided, and simultaneously procure additional information every two to three months.

Analytics for customer relationship manager:

It helps to identify the problems affecting customer service, and allows one to understand delays in delivery, response time for information requests, the number and nature of complaints and claims and numerous other factors.

A BI tool for customer relationship management set priorities to serve key customers and to understand buying behaviour and customer satisfaction for various market segments, client profiles, products and services. Team members can use consistent goals and expectations to satisfy service expectations and be accountable for established objectives. Where results are declining or customer satisfaction is poor, the organization can quickly assess the root cause of the problem and adapt processes, training, policies and procedures to ensure that critical business initiatives are not put at risk.

How CRM and BI are driving modern marketing?

1. Pricing consideration: Big data helps you to do away with out-date practices. Exploiting the loads of data available from customer interactions enables companies to price a product correctly. BI can help manage dynamic pricing to improve revenue generation, with the use of real-time inventory and supplier data and correlate it with financial forecasts and customer behaviour analysis
2. Decision making: With CRM data, BI can help unlock various trends around marketing. You get to serve your customers based on their personas, buying behavior, and industry influence. This way you can engage better with them and influence their opinions in favor of your brand.
3. Effective customer care: With the huge volume of data available with your organization, you can personalize your marketing messages and outreach programs for maximum potential of success. With BI, you can craft multi-channel marketing techniques. This in turn increase customer engagement prompts up-sell/cross-sell, and improves customer retention.

How CRM can use BI?

1. Better data = better BI: Once the CRM application is synced with a BI solution, you can extract gold-level insights to aid your decision making. If the input CRM data is clean and appropriately consolidated, you will be able to generate intelligent and useful data. The reverse is also true. Hence, CRM data that is maintained diligently can lead to better BI and actionable insights. This can be achieved by incorporating rigorous processes to consolidate the multiple databases in the CRM application.
2. Evaluate what you need: The next step is to describe where you are, on the CRM-BI planning and deployment metric. Focus on what supports your business and what impacts your customers. You need not be overwhelmed by fancy BI and analytics technologies if they don't suit your business objectives. Take for example, predictive analytics. With CRM data you can add a lot of value to behavioural intelligence and come up with personalized marketing tactics to improve cross-sell and upsell of products
3. Plan and grow: CRM and BI system integration needs to be well-thought of in order to work seamlessly and deliver expected outcomes. You may have constraints of budgets or time, but no rushed implementation can yield the results you are expecting. Hence the integration needs to be a well-planned affair.

Some examples for such CRM software integrating Business intelligence are:

1. ZOHO online CRM software

2. CELOXIS

4. SCORO

5. Liquid planner

6. Active collab

7. Composity

Conclusion:

Business intelligence in CRM has been a huge win - win situation for both the business as well as for the customers by providing benefits listed below:

• Centralize and share resources, develop strategies and align communications
• No manual data entry needed
• See what needs to be done next
• Track budgets, costs and profits in real-time.
• Smooth and trouble-free implementation methodology
• Share immediate project data, tracking progress
• Empower users with a flexible, intuitive interface that fits their way of working.

Article by: Samhitha.yadav