Understanding how your customers think and what their expectations and desires are is essential for any company that wants a promising and profitable future. After all, you can only create supply when you know what’s in demand. Incidentally, there are sophisticated ways to get this valuable information in the form of customer relationship management.
We’re talking, of course, about analytical CRMs. These specialized relationship management tools help turn customer interactions into business insights. In turn, those insights can inform business decisions that help you strengthen your business’s offerings. This means it’s pretty important to explore them in detail so you can choose the one that works for you.
What is an analytical CRM?
An analytical CRM, sometimes referred to as a predictive CRM, is a specialized CRM that uses data analysis and modeling to identify patterns and trends in customer behavior.
These features help businesses tailor their marketing, sales, and even product development strategies to better meet the needs and expectations of their customers. But analytical variants are just one of the CRMs that are available to you. Depending on the needs of your business, you might be better served with another approach to customer relationship management.
The different types of CRM software and how they compare
While some CRMs are tailored to specific types of businesses, others are developed with broader applications in mind. In this sense, there are three categories or subsets of CRM software:
- Operational CRMs: These are traditional CRMs that help manage and automate the day-to-day business of interacting with customers. They’re typically tailored to sales, marketing, and customer service teams and include tools for managing customer information, tracking interactions, and collaborating with team members.
- Analytical CRM: Compared to operational CRMs, analytical CRMs are focused on analyzing customer information. These systems collect data about customers and how they interact with the business’s products and services and then use this data to produce actionable insights.
- Collaborative CRM: In terms of managing customer information, these are similar to operational CRMs. Functionally, however, they’re designed to facilitate easy collaboration and communication among teams with tools for sharing customer data and coordinating interactions with team members.
Some businesses find value in using more than one system. For example, their sales and marketing team might use an operational CRM while their e-commerce team uses an analytical CRM to collect and process data from their online store. monday sales CRM can be used for all of these functions, making it cost and workflow effective.
Types of data an analytical CRM can collect
Since they’re designed to collect and analyze data, analytical CRMs usually provide better collection for external data points, which can be powerful indicators for every business team.
Sales
Analytical CRMs provide sales teams with data points that can help improve the entire sales pipeline. These indicators can unlock data for a customer’s behavior and activity, such as how long they spent viewing a product online or how often they visit certain pages on the company’s website. This information helps salespeople better forecast sales and profits and fine-tune their strategies.
Marketing
Marketers will find analytical CRMs equally equitable for their campaigns. By leveraging the usual demographics and connecting them with numerous other channels, such as social media activity and behavior and response and open rates for different campaigns, marketers can bring customer personas to life.
Finance
With access to much more data about customer activity and intent, finance teams will find tracking financial performance and forecasting future revenue far more accurate. And this valuable data informs the larger strategic decisions so that businesses can stay profitable and oriented towards growth. That said, in collecting such immense data, there are trade-offs, and different platforms examine information data in different ways. Just as there are different types of CRMs, there are different types of analytical CRMs.
Types of analytical CRMs
When it comes to the nuances of data collection and processing, there are generally three ways to analyze information. While the differences can be marginal, it’s worth exploring the different models so you can choose a CRM that’s aligned with your overall strategy.
- Descriptive CRMs: This model collects vast amounts of data to paint accurate pictures of your customers, their behavior, and their preferences. In short, these CRMs describe your audience with a high degree of accuracy.
- Predictive CRMs: Predictive models are oriented toward the future. By analyzing customer behaviors and patterns more closely, predictive CRMs can determine what your customers are likely to do in the coming weeks, months, and years.
- Prescriptive CRMs: Taking a wider view of customer data, prescriptive CRMs use decision-making algorithms to suggest specific strategies and actions for improving results.
In terms of data analysis, descriptive CRMs are the least complex with prescriptive models sitting on the other hand of the spectrum. Predictive systems sit somewhere in between. But this isn’t to say the differences are vast: Each model still provides a wealth of benefits.
Benefits of analytical CRMs
When it comes to making decisions based on customer data, it’s nearly impossible to choose incorrectly between the three types of analytical CRMs. Each one of these data analysis powerhouses provides the same key benefits:
- Enhanced targeting: They supercharge your customer analysis, bringing enhanced clarity to your marketing and sales teams so they can focus their efforts on strategies they know work.
- Increased revenue: When you give your customers exactly what they want, they tend to stick around. By improving customer loyalty, you’ll keep revenues high and rising.
- Reduced costs: Businesses can turn rich customer profiles into optimal processes and campaigns across sales, marketing, customer service, and any other team with customer touchpoints.
The immense advantages of analytical CRMs are hard to ignore, let alone deny, seeing as they can improve a business on nearly every front. But to get the most from this data-oriented approach, you need the right set of tools.
Analyzing customer data with monday sales CRM
When it comes to data collection, monday sales CRM software was designed from the ground up to provide easy and flexible access to any metric imaginable. Out of the box, our Work OS features powerful CRM capabilities that can help you get the most out of every customer interaction. From contact and lead management to customizable sales pipelines, you can hit the ground running.
Unlike CRMs that feel stuck in time, with monday.com’s flexible approach to data, the buck doesn’t stop at the features you have now.All of our templates are completely customizable, so you can collect information and build workflows that are relevant to your business. And if you want exceptional analytical prowess, you can set your developers loose on our low-code tools to build your own custom applications.
Frequently asked questions
If you’re looking for more information on analytical CRMs, here are the answers to a couple of queries that people frequently ask:
What’s an example of an analytical CRM?
A good example of an analytical CRM is one that collects and analyzes the online activity, purchase history, and engagement of a business’s customers to predict how those customers might respond to certain marketing campaigns. This helps marketing teams streamline their efforts and focus on strategies and channels that are most likely to succeed.
What’s the difference between operational and analytical CRMs?
Operational CRMs are focused on managing customer information and automating day-to-day customer interactions. Analytical CRMs, on the other hand, are focused on the analysis and modeling of the data a CRM collects. They can help identify trends and patterns in customer data and use this information to make predictions about future client behaviors.
Turn customer interactions into business insights
When you can measure your customer’s interactions and behaviors across a wealth of data points and with an even hand, you gain a deep understanding of their preferences, wants, and must-haves. Not only does this help you build better products and services, but it gives you the opportunity to provide value in a way that’ll keep them around for years to come.
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