Consumers have virtually limitless options for every conceivable form of good or service. Building relationships with consumers is one of the finest ways for a business or organization to stand out from the competition.
Platforms for managing customer relationships have been available for years, but they really took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They provide databases created especially for storing client data and monitoring interactions — everything required for a more individualized engagement. However, CRMs by their very nature introduce another issue: the difficulty of managing customer data. The latest generation of business intelligence tools driven by artificial intelligence are specifically made to assist with that.
The Role of CRM Integrating Business Intelligence
CRM and business intelligence integration can have significant advantages. You will be able to:
- Keep customers and strengthen bonds with them
- Make solid analyses in order to make data-driven judgments
- Boost sales and earnings
- Reduce churn
CRM systems combine and arrange customer and prospect data, control marketing campaigns, spot business possibilities, and track customer care concerns. In short, a CRM system enables you to maintain relationships with clients, grow your business, and increase earnings.
Data is gathered from many sources, such as marketing, billing, and customer service systems, by BI solutions in order to analyze trends, identify performance gaps, spot opportunities, and make data-driven choices.
CRM and business intelligence integration may give you useful insights about client portfolios and support the creation of customized advertising campaigns that increase revenue and conversion rates.
Why using BI Tools May Help with CRM
Any program or technological platform that makes it simpler to conduct business operations is referred to as a business tool. AI is used by business intelligence products to expand their capabilities. Listed below are a few points on what to anticipate while investing in business intelligence tools for CRM according to one of the Top Digital Transformation Companies in Singapore.
- Simplifying data input and capturing
CRMs are worthless without customer information. Historically, members of the sales team and other employees had to manually enter this data. Business intelligence systems powered by AI can speed up this procedure by extracting data from intake papers, classifying it automatically, and entering it into the appropriate database areas. In the future, AI will be able to take this data from databases and automatically insert it into other papers to speed up the marketing and sales processes.
Customers want businesses to respond to their issues immediately. Without the need for a person to examine them, business intelligence systems using natural language processing can really determine the purpose of emails, messages, and social media postings. This increases customer satisfaction and reduces the amount of labor required by customer success professionals by enabling the user to provide an acceptable answer promptly.
Customer data includes more than just identifiers like a person's name and email address; it includes all their interactions with a business, and their online activity. Unfortunately for businesses, an estimated 80% to 90% of the enormous amount of customer and consumer data created each day is unstructured, making it hard for most CRMs to handle.
Even the largest organizations would go bankrupt if they had to manually organize all their client data. Business intelligence technologies handle the labor-intensive task of sorting through mountains of data and turning it into information that can be stored in the CRM. In order to structure data around last-purchase dates, lifetime customer value, and product interest, AI may extract information from sales logs, customer service comments, and website browsing history. This information can then be utilized for more direct sales and marketing activities.
Even when data is organized, the sheer amount of it can be so overwhelming that strategists are unable to see any patterns or useful information. Managers in this situation can use AI to examine the data for them. Even predicted behavior models can benefit from the information offered by AI. Marketers may create models that forecast how likely a consumer is to respond to a sale or how likely they are to purchase a certain product by using individual customer data and analyzing broader patterns.
The most time-consuming components of CRM administration are data collecting and structure, therefore when comparing business intelligence products, search for ones that automate these tasks. Make sure the product interacts with your current CRM in order to get the most out of this data collection.
Use Cases
Let's examine a few CRM application use cases for business intelligence:
Determine the issues that have an impact on customer service, such as order delays, lengthy information request response times, complaint sources, and more. You may better service important customers and analyze consumer trends by using a powerful CRM solution.
Give insightful analysis on the performance of the sales force. To measure performance and monitor indicators like overall sales, lead conversion rates, revenue, average deal size, quota attainment, and more, create real-time, customized dashboards for each salesperson to monitor progress toward predetermined goals.
CRM marketing tools make it easier to go through contact databases and find profitable consumers. You may categorize your consumers using their most recent purchases, preferences, social media activity, and more. You may create individualized marketing strategies to increase sales based on segmentation.
To measure marketing KPIs like website traffic, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer retention rate, revenue growth, and more, create user-friendly dashboards.
- Human Resource Management
Utilizing CRM with business intelligence integration, you may track staff performance, keep an eye on goals, suggest training courses, set vacation times, and guarantee resource optimization.
Read Also: Exploring New Horizons with Business Intelligence
5 Tips for a Smarter Customer Strategy Using CRM and BI
Let's look at how to combine BI with your CRM software solution now that you are aware of how it will affect your company.
First, let's establish the foundation.
1. Understanding customers and their experiences
Understanding your clients is essential for company success. It helps create effective plans that are based on their wants and requirements. Your CRM approach is one of those tactics.
If millennials make up a sizable section of your clientele, you should be aware that they frequently use social media. Therefore, you want to have a social CRM strategy in place to be more efficient.
Understanding who your consumers are and how they find your business should be a goal of your social CRM strategy. You must comprehend their interactions with your business as well. To do that, interactions across various marketing channels must be tracked. Analyzing the sales process is also a part of it.
For instance:
- Do consumers who contribute higher value have a different experience than those who give less value?
- Do relations with customers encounter any obstacles? If so, what exactly are these?
- How do you go about reporting your tags?
You may respond to these inquiries using the information you have from your CRM. Then you may decide how your BI tools can assist you in completing the information gaps.
2. Selecting the best BI tool
After reviewing the operation of your present system, you must select the best BI tool.
When choosing a BI tool, you need to consider several factors. The most important thing is to make sure the product you choose works with and connects with your existing CRM system.
Your data should be presented by the greatest BI tool in an understandable style. Your team will be able to perform data analysis quicker if you provide the data in an understandable format.
You will expand quicker if you use pertinent data to support your company decisions. Studies have revealed plenty of advantages that data may bring to your company.
These consist of:
- Businesses that use data to make decisions are 23 times more likely to gain new clients.
- Businesses that are data-driven are six times more likely to keep consumers.
Essentially, you want to use your new data insights to optimize the internal operations of your company. If the data serves as your guide, you should decide wisely, increasing revenue and improving conversion rates.
You don't have to stick with the first tool you come across. A free trial is available for most online software solutions. Utilize that chance to test your program. Don't be hesitant to test out a few tools before settling on one.
3. Carrying out data triage
Your company will first be overrun with data from a BI tool. You may concentrate on the most useful data areas after you have a clear picture of your company goals.
This may be accomplished by exporting a lesser number of metrics to the charting and data visualization functions of your BI application. The sample that follows demonstrates the metrics that this specific company appreciates the most. You must choose the KPIs that matter most to your firm because they will vary greatly from one another.
Up to 63% of firms lack an efficient strategy for triaging their data, which results in a loss of time, energy, and resources. You can only remove the irrelevant data with an effective triage system, leaving behind information that will benefit your company and eventually boost sales.
4. Creating a business strategy using personal observations
You should be ready to proceed with a business strategy based on what you learnt after you are confident with how your BI tool functions and all essential testing has been finished.
For instance, if you discover that clients aren't receiving prompt replies from your business, you may want to restructure operations. Or perhaps you need to change the entire way you deal with customers since it's not giving you the outcomes you desire.
Your company should be able to cooperate more successfully if you use BI to supplement your CRM data analysis with personalized metrics and interactive dashboards. Due to the importance of current measurements and useful data, they should also assist you in making decisions more swiftly. Your customer experience should be far better than it was previously, which will inevitably result in bigger sales. You can contact TransformHub, the best Digital Transformation Solutions Company, to review and test BI tools.
5. Conducting regular strategy audits
Even if you currently have a data-driven plan in place, you must remain vigilant for potential problems.
Period strategy audits let you assess your progress toward your CRM objectives and pinpoint problems that require fixing. You'll then be able to modify your CRM approach as necessary.
The following should be included in your audit:
- Data evaluation: Verify the accuracy of the data. Does it also promote adherence to legal requirements? Organizations must make sure that data is collected lawfully and in accordance with rigorous guidelines, for instance, in order to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation. The organizations that gather the data should also safeguard it against abuse. Companies with headquarters in any EU member state as well as those that provide goods and services to consumers inside the EU are subject to the GDPR.
- What are the integrated system's gaps?
- Does the new system meet the needs of the workforce? To learn more about your employees' feelings, conduct interviews with them. Surveys may support interviews and provide you with frank feedback. Meanwhile, observing staff might help you determine whether or not they are familiar with the new system.
- Results: What effect does the new system have, for instance, on customer churn? How long does it often take to close a lead?
With the data your company now has access to, together with your BI tools and CRM data analysis, you're in a good place. You will be able to make more intelligent business decisions, thanks to the insights gathered from your new integration process.
Conclusion
Customer happiness and satisfaction are the most crucial criteria any firm can work on increasing in light of the intense market rivalry. This depends on prompt replies, customized outreach, and pertinent offers, all of which require well-managed data. Effective data management will come to be associated with raising customer satisfaction as digital experiences take over as the primary means through which businesses communicate with their clients. TransformHub offers free trials, so you can check out what our platform can achieve for you.
+
