Lets talk about some analytics

To start this blog, I will first narrate a story: Story of two Chocolate companies BabyChoco & ChocoSmart.  ChocoSmart is in the market for quite sometime where as BabyChoco has just entered the market. ChocoSmart, being the undisputed leader of the market, relies on their old legacy customer service application and does not want to re look their customer sentiment. BabyChoco on the other hand, with a hope to get better business insights decides to concentrate more to understand their customer needs.

BabyChoco decided to gather data from market to understand what consumer likes about them and what more they want. Soon CRM Consultant form a team and a nationwide survey via all possible communication channels was conducted. Data started pouring in from all the sales hubs.

CRM tool quickly started projecting the likes and dislikes of their consumers. With the help of the survey analysis they also got an insight about the demand of low cost dark chocolates which is not available in Rural India. Based on the survey, BabyChoco changed their business plan and started producing that type of chocolates that the consumer wants.

Soon the result started showing in. The sales shoot up for Dark Chocolates and the brand becomes popular in rural areas. Within one year, they beat ChocoSmart and become the number one Chocolate company in the country.

Both ChocoSmart and BabyChoco were using CRM. Then what special BabyChoco did? Well they realized the power of Analytical CRM and used it in a precised fashion.

In my previous blogs, I discussed about cloud option, various ideas to make CRM a success and multiple other stuffs. In this blog, its time now to go bit more deeper and discuss about a crucial element on CRM named: Analytical CRM.

So, what is Analytical CRM? As I stated in my example, it is something that helps organization to mine data received from various channel sources. It basically consists of five primary blocks. Interact-FineTune-Storage-Analyze and Construct. The below picture will give you a better idea about the flow of information in analytical CRM.

As you can see, upon gathering information, organization first needs to refine those information so that only relevant information gets stored in the DB. Post the fine tuning, organization stores all these data in their server. Another team, periodically retrieves those data from system of records(database) and analyze based on various business parameters. Finally based on the analysis, organization construct their marketing and selling plan and take the business forward.


Coming to the benefits it brings, as described in my example, it definitely helps organization to get more insights about their customers, what your customers like or dislike, what is their expectation, what benefits they would love to see in the product etc. Once you start getting these insights about your customers, it will automatically improve the relationships. Some research also proves that A-CRM helped organization to optimize cross selling and up selling opportunities as well. It also helps company to integrate enterprise strategy with marketing strategy.

However, like any other implementation, A-CRM also requires to follow some best practices in order to get the best of out it.  From my personal experience, I have seen that one of the key elements of success in A-CRM is capturing all relevant customer information from different sources and touch-points. Touch-points could be anything ranging from direct email, to survey, to call center data or simple ATM or Kiosk based data collection. You should consider each and every dialogue that your organization had with your customers. Furthermore, organization needs to apply various analytical methods to optimize their relationship with customers. Also, it is important to store good amount of historical data. We recommend organization to keep at least 10 years data with them so that they can analyze trend and also derive various plans based on that.

Hope by now you get a good idea about A-CRM.
Please feel free to comment if you have any.