What Is Analytical CRM: A Complete Guide to Its Types, Benefits & Features

Analyzing different data sets is important for businesses to understand latest sales trends and consumer behavior. Businesses use analytical CRM tools for this purpose and incorporate data insights into their sales, marketing, and customer support procedures. Read more for insights on how analytical CRM can help your business.

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All businesses need to perform analysis of customers’ data to build and improve the relationship with customers and form effective sales and marketing strategies. Analytical CRM software helps businesses with these functions and lets them generate different data reports to take actionable decisions.

Apart from that, it helps with sales forecasting, understanding buying patterns, finding new sales opportunities and more. Here in this article, you will learn more about analytical CRM, its features, benefits, applications, and much more.

What Is Analytical CRM?

Analytical CRM stores and analyzes the customer data to provide businesses with insights on customer behavior and purchase intentions. It can be used to simplify multiple tasks such as segregating customers, maintaining data in a centralized database, improving customer retention, etc.

With analytical CRM tools, organizations can analyze all the customer’s data and their interactions. This helps organizations predict customer trends and suggests relevant products to customers.

Applications of Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM is an integral part of customer relationship management. This is used to capture and analyze different types of data including:

• Sales Data: This may include purchase and return history, product preferences, sales growth, highest selling products, etc. The analysis of this data will help you to learn about the highest and lowest selling products, customers’ buying patterns, and choosing the right sales procedure to reach out to more people.
• Financial Data: Financial data includes the customer’s payment and credit history, payment type, credit scores, etc. It can help in learning the revenue generated per customer, profitable customer groups, customer acquisition cost, and more.
• Marketing Data: Marketing data comprise customer response rate, customer retention and satisfaction data, marketing campaigns’ performance, etc. Organizations can analyze this data to improve their marketing strategies and analyze customer purchase patterns.

Key Features of Analytical CRM

CRM analytical software offers features like online analytical processing, customer segregation, sales forecasting, consumer behavior prediction, etc. With these functionalities, businesses can improve customer relationships and sales procedures.

• Online Analytical Processing: This helps organizations to gather and analyze different datasets like sales and marketing data at one place. It helps businesses to get a bigger picture of different data and perform comparative analysis.
• Customer Segregation: The analysis of customers’ data would help you to segregate them as per demographics, preferences, purchase history, etc. As a result, you can create customer-centric sales and marketing campaigns to improve retention rates and drive in more customers.
• Sales Forecasting: Through Analytical CRM, businesses can study past sales metrics and latest sales trends that assist in sales forecasting. With multiple algorithms and business intelligence (BI), organizations get the relevant data to choose sales procedures that drive in more revenue.
• Customer Life Cycle: With analytical CRM tools, the customer’s data is captured from multiple channels including his or her first sign up, purchase data, payment method, etc. This information helps in analyzing the entire life cycle of customers to get insights into their buying patterns and preferences.
• Consumer Behavior Prediction: By creating and analyzing predictive marketing models, businesses can predict consumer behavior. This prediction helps decide which marketing campaign would work best for the target audience and drive in more revenue.

Benefits of Analytical CRM Software

Analytical CRM Software helps businesses in understanding their customer’s buying patterns and behavior. Additionally, they can also generate different analytical reports and find more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling through CRM for analytics.

• Learning Consumer’s Buying Patterns: Analytical CRM software stores all the relevant data related to customers including their purchase history, preferences, etc. All this data is used to understand the customer’s buying patterns and suggest products based on it.
• Generate Analytical Reports: With CRM software, you can easily perform data analysis and generate reports for customers, services, sales channels, and market data. This helps organizations to create different strategies that align with the organization’s goals.
• Secure Storage of Data: It stores all the data related to feedback forms, billing/invoices, website data, marketing campaigns, etc., in a centralized database. This keeps the data secured and makes it available for analysis.
• Supports Real-Time Decision Making: All the data is processed and analyzed in real-time to gain valuable insights. Therefore, allowing businesses to modify their existing sales and marketing strategies.
• New sales opportunities: Understanding your customer’s purchasing patterns and other product preferences will help you to find more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. Therefore, every time a new product is launched, you can automatically suggest it to interested buyers via promotional messages, etc.

Suggested Read: Types of CRM Software: How Should You Choose One for Your Business

How Can Businesses Use Analytical CRM?

All organizations can use analytical customer relationship management solutions for multiple purposes. From predicting sales trends, improving customer satisfaction to improving marketing campaigns, an analytical CRM can help businesses in several ways.

• Predict Trends: Organizations can compare and analyze the past sales trends with the current market conditions to find out the purchasing behavior of customers. With this, they can forecast sales trends that can work with the target audience.

• Improve Customer’s Satisfaction: Businesses can collect the customer’s data from multiple channels and use it to improve their experience. By analyzing the customer’s profiles in detail, they can learn about his or her preferences and create customized marketing campaigns for them.

• Refine Sales Processes: With the analytical CRM, organizations get insights into the customer’s buying patterns and product preferences. All this information can be used to choose the most relevant sales methods that will bring the best results. Further, they can also track their sales activities to constantly evaluate and improve.

• Improve Marketing Campaigns: Businesses can gain insights by analyzing customers’ interactions and purchase history. The valuable data can be used to create marketing campaigns that will yield the best results and improve the conversion rate.

Analytical CRM Vs Other CRM Software

• Analytical CRM Vs Operational CRM

The Analytical CRM is generally used to gather and analyze the customer, sales, marketing, and service data. Whereas an operational CRM is used to manage and automate tasks related to sales, marketing, and support. The main purpose of this CRM is to build and maintain healthy relationships with customers.

The insights gained through the data analysis would be useful for implementing changes in the sales and marketing strategies. Moreover, you can also identify sales trends and understand which geographical areas are generating more profit.

With operational CRM, users can generate and convert leads, send follows-up mails, create email campaigns, track customer interactions, etc.

• Analytical CRM Vs Collaborative CRM

While analytical CRM works around capturing and analyzing different data sets to gain valuable insights, collaborative CRM is used to share relevant customer’s data and information within the organization. All the information gathered through analysis is shared with other departments to improve the organization’s functioning. Some functionalities of the Collaborative CRM software include interaction and channel management, communication management, etc.

Collaborative CRM serves as a medium for different departments to collaborate and work on the customer’s data to improve customer satisfaction and retention.

Suggested Read: 14 Best CRM Software for Small Businesses in India

Conclusion

To grow and expand your business, data analysis and forecasting are essential. That’s where analytical CRM can come in handy. With it, businesses can easily capture data and analyze it to improve the decision-making process. Incorporating insights from analysis would help the organization to change existing sales and marketing strategies and work on improving the customer experience.

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