ThinkAnalytics

The Need For Customer
Relationship Analytics

Successful companies are focused on implementing customer-centric processes and technologies to optimize customer relationships. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is ranked as a top priority for organizations striving to enhance profitability, revenue growth and customer satisfaction. Companies can now acquire and serve customers across a wide range of channels.

As a result, increased competition and readiness mandate executives to gain a 360-degree customer understanding to facilitate satisfaction and acquisition. An understanding of the potential value and profitability of acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers requires knowledge-based solutions that identify key customer requirements. The new insights surrounding customers can make the difference between winning and losing in today's global economy.

CRM is an enterprise business strategy encompassing a broad range of processes and functions, including call center management, sales force automation, e-commerce, field service and e-mail management.

At ThinkAnalytics, the CRM market is viewed in two segments:

•   CRM front-office operational processes; and
  
  
•   CRM analytical business processes.

CRM front-office solutions have been a primary focus for organizations; and unfortunately, very little emphasis has been placed on customer analysis. And even though many companies have successfully implemented CRM front-office capabilities to provide new and immediate customer interaction channels, these same companies are missing the value generated by analyzing new and existing customer information.

Without Customer Relationship Analytics(CRA), organizations lack the ability to discover meaningful correlations, patterns and trends required to recognize return on investment from CRM front-office investments and existing customer data.

The Complete Customer Picture

CRA helps organizations understand customer needs, differentiation, segmentation, loyalty, value and marketing effectiveness. To analyze this complete customer picture, information must be extracted from operational, ERP and front-office CRM systems and be combined with external market information. The analysis of such information, in conjunction with the business strategy, drives customer-focused business initiatives forward.

The analytical process should automatically analyze customer data, identify problems, predict future events, identify key initiatives, and communicate enriched customer and business information. Total CRA can only be achieved through an integrated process that understands the relationships and effects of every customer behavior function.

For instance, achieving higher profit margins by increasing price will inevitably increase customer attrition; but if this same objective is achieved through cost reduction, it might easily put crucial marketing campaigns at risk. How do you make the best business decisions? Good business decisions can only be made if pertinent data and analytical capabilities are in hand.

Integrating Customer Intelligence

The massive customer data generated by traditional customer-focused systems and e-commerce solutions adds complexity to the analytical process. It is impossible to manually analyze vast quantities of customer data in order to provide critical and timely responses. Solutions must be automated and intelligent in order to not only mimic human analysis but also to improve it.

          
   

Conclusions

The customer picture is very much like a jigsaw puzzle - not until all pieces are in place can the picture be understood. ThinkAnalytics' application suite provides the essential piece of the puzzle: customer intelligence that enables organizations to interact with customers more effectively and add value to the large quantities of customer data stored in CRM solutions, data warehouses or e-commerce databases.

By closing the gap between customer interaction and business goals and providing a 360-degree customer understanding, CRA is becoming an essential business process for organizations focused on customers as a core corporate strategy.