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The Blurred Line Between CRM & Business Intelligence
by:
Tom Meers, President,
Principal Consultant
As companies finalize their efforts to automate key business areas like ERP and
operations management, they are turning to Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
and a new concept called Customer Data Integration (CDI).
The line between how customer data is
managed and how it is analyzed is beginning to blur.
Almost every aspect of operational and strategic Business Intelligence
(BI), another key focus for most business, involves the use of customer data and
dimensions that directly relate to customer service and sales.
CRM systems have traditionally addressed
this need by providing operational reporting and built-in dashboards.
However, today’s decision makers are
demanding that customer centric data be integrated with information from other
systems of record such as ERP and operations. This
integration provides a more complete view of the customer and of customer
metrics, allowing decision makers to refine such critical expense areas as
advertising, e-marketing and sales event management.
By leveraging a combination of BI and CRM
technologies, new insights into buying behavior and factors that affect
purchasing are allowing company leaders to not only streamline their sales and
marketing expenses, but also to focus efforts on customer segments where there
is a higher probability of closing business.
The leveraging of multiple technologies such as CRM and BI involve careful
consideration of some key points. First,
it is very important to assure that the deeper analysis that BI offers doesn’t
adversely impact production CRM systems. Conventional
reporting and dashboards for CRM can have a negative impact on CRM system
performance because they often access CRM data directly.
While the latency of such data is real
time, which can be an advantage, such approaches to analyzing customer related
data can wreak havoc on customer services users and sales people.
A properly planned approach typically
includes data management technology that allows for the provision of optimized
databases from which complex analysis can be performed without affecting
production CRM users. Such an approach is
usually outside of what CRM vendors can offer, but there is increasing interest
in the marriage of CRM data with BI.
Another
key consideration includes how BI technology can be used to enhance the
effectiveness of CRM systems. Most CRM
solutions include sales leads and opportunity work flow.
This functionality provides greater
control over sales pipelines and improves the accuracy of forecasting.
However, if the various aspects of a CRM
workflow are not analyzed, it can become one more obstacle to CRM adoption and
result in more overhead for salespeople. By
applying advanced BI technologies to CRM workflows, managers can understand key
metrics that help with the sales cycle. For
example, trend analysis can show how long a typical sale takes to move from one
stage of the workflow to the next. By
applying customer demographics salespeople can determine which types of
customers will move to close sooner. This
can substantially increase the amount of business a given salesperson completes
in a given period of time.
It’s only a matter of time until most companies realize the importance of
integrating CRM and BI. Many already have and are realizing benefits that range from
higher salesperson productivity to improved customer service at a lower cost.
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