CRM

Using CRM Analytics: The Treasure Trove of Customer Data You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Dec 14, 2017

Customer data is plentiful, but if you're not using it to its full potential, you're missing out. Everything you need to know about CRM analytics.

Deeksha MalikContent Analyst

How many buyers who bought from your website at least five times in the past 90 days are from New Jersey? Or Texas?

How many people are visiting your website each day? Are they returning after the first visit? Are people going beyond the home page and looking at other pages?

Customer relationship management (CRM) analytics tools can provide answers to these questions and more.

If you aren't tapping into CRM analytics, you won't understand your customers well enough to provide optimal customer experiences, which means you won't be able to keep up with businesses that are leveraging customer data.

According to a study by CX consulting firm, Walker, customer experience will be more important for brand differentiation than price or product by 2020.

As businesses increasingly understand the importance of customer experience and strive to be more customer-centric at every touch point, they'll turn to CRM analytics to create more effective CX strategies.

In this article, we'll explain what exactly CRM analytics is, and how tools that provide CRM analytics can benefit your small business. We'll also take a look at a few popular CRM analytics tools that cater specifically to small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

What is CRM analytics?

CRM analytics is the use of automation to process customer data, in order to make better business decisions.

CRM analytics tools can ultimately improve sales for SMBs by helping them:

  • Study customer behavior

  • Measure engagement and retention

  • Measure the impact of marketing campaigns

Software tools that offer CRM analytics gather customer data from internal and external sources, such as sales reports, customer feedback, and social media comments. The platform then analyzes customer buying patterns and predicts customer behavior to help businesses gain strategic knowledge and insights related to their product, marketing, and sales processes.

For example, by applying analytics to your website visitor data, you can see patterns in customer behavior and segment them accordingly. Once you know who you're targeting, it's easier to improve their experience on your website.

CRM data analytics for small businesses

Businesses generate large volumes of data nowadays, and there is no excuse for businesses -regardless of size - not to employ CRM analytics. Customer data can take many forms: customer demographics, sales data, email marketing campaign data (open rates, bounce rates, etc.), supplier history, web analytics, and much more.

Are you ready to leverage this abundance of data for better insights and competitive advantage? If so, here are some of the key benefits your business can expect to see:

Top 4 benefits of using CRM analytics for small businesses

From enhancing customer relations to improving supply chain management (better inventory control, faster delivery, etc.), customer data analytics can go a long way toward ensuring SMBs have satisfied customers who will keep coming back.

Some of the most notable benefits include:

1. Better customer segmenting for targeted marketing

CRM software collects information about customers and prospects, such as their social media behavior, foot traffic in store, and online purchase behavior. CRM analytics tools process this data and uncover useful insights about customer behavior and demographics. Customers can then be segmented based on geography, age, buyer preferences, and more.

Useful software tools and functions: Tools that perform CRM analytics can organize your email marketing contact data into segments based on custom criteria. They can also help you identify "highly engaged" social media users to target them with specific advertising campaigns.

2. Improved monitoring of marketing campaign effectiveness

With CRM data analytics, you can see which marketing and sales strategies are working best, and which need to be revisited or done away with. You can use insights drawn from the data you have to create new campaigns that maximize your return on investment (ROI).

Useful software tools and functions: Many general CRM tools offer analytics functions. For example, Zoho CRM lets you pull data from multiple files and third-party apps to perform cross-functional analysis. With this functionality, you can compare marketing campaign figures against sales reports to separate existing valuable customers from leads that need further nurturing.

Similarly, with Agile CRM, you can analyze customer preferences and social media engagement trends with social media activity reports, timelines, and real-time alerts. You can use the reports to create targeted drip marketing campaigns as well as send emails and discount coupons based on customer behavior.

3. Enhanced customer experience through constant feedback

With CRM analytics, you can keep tabs on customer satisfaction levels. You can also track whether there is a particular area where customers are repeatedly unhappy.

If, for example, your customer support staff receives regular complaints about the download process for your software. This could mean there's a bug in the installation process that's creating a poor user experience. Your customer service staff must then pass on this feedback to the IT department to address that bug.

Useful software tools and functions: Customer experience and analytics tools can actually collect data from customer interactions across channels, identify patterns, and offer insights about customer likes and dislikes.

4. 360-degree insight into salesperson performance

By performing CRM analytics, you can track the performance of sales personnel based on various metrics, such as number of deals closed, number of leads, and revenue generated.

Useful software tools and functions: Sales data generated through CRM analytics can help you identify your strongest and weakest performers. You can reach out to representatives that need additional training or redistribute opportunities to other sales representatives. If your business has multiple locations, data analytics can help you explore sales opportunities and performance by territory.

If you're looking for an analytics tool…

There are plenty of tools that offer functions to process, analyze, and gain insights from customer data, which you can then use in your decision-making. Below are some example solutions for your reference.

We've picked these tools after considering factors such as pricing, user reviews, features, and integrations.

NetSuite CRM+

NetSuite's CRM platform includes capabilities that enable sales, marketing, and service professionals to access marketing and sales reports, which offer information on sales quotas, sales forecasts, the sales pipeline, and more.

NetSuite CRM+ measures customer support metrics related to call resolution times, customer satisfaction, call volumes and trends, and more.

In addition, marketing teams can gain insights about unique website visitors, lead generation trends, and customer acquisition costs, among others.

Caption: Customer dashboard in NetSuite CRM+ (Source: GetApp)

TeamSupport

TeamSupport is a cloud-based B2B customer service and help desk tool that comes with built-in analytics dashboards. Its reporting functionalities enable users to view organizational data (e.g., financial and sales data) in multiple formats, such as summary, tabular, chart, and graph.

Advanced reporting capabilities include filtering, report cloning, enhanced sorting, and individual viewer functions.

Caption: Reporting dashboard in TeamSupport (Source: GetApp)

Alteryx

Alteryx is a data analytics solution, which, through its customer analytics functionality, helps users forecast customer demand, identify prospects, and analyze data by demographics.

By analyzing all the customer data gathered from multiple sources, you can get a holistic view of customer behavior, as well as get an overall picture of trends in order to drive strategy.

Caption: Competition risk analysis view on Alteryx (Source: Software Advice)

Next steps

When you have the most accurate information about your customers, you'll have the tools to deliver better customer experiences and, in turn, strengthen customer loyalty, retain existing customers, and attract new ones.

Explore these additional software types on GetApp to get started on your CRM analytics journey:

Also, check out some further resources on our blog to take a deeper dive into CRM analytics, the tools available, and the numerous benefits:

About the author

Deeksha Malik

Content Analyst