Integrating CRM & BI

Gartner expects that CRM software revenues will touch $37 billion this year. Imagine the massive volume of customer information available to businesses worldwide. This gigantic explosion of customer data has the potential to put you firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to building brand reputation, personalizing your marketing campaigns to the tastes and preferences of your customer, and reducing customer churn.

However this won’t happen on its own. You will need the insight generation prowess of BI to be plugged in to your CRM solution. Together, BI and CRM analytics can support your organization to find correlations, which would allow you to determine patterns and trends in customer data.

How CRM and BI are driving modern marketing?

• Pricing Consideration

Big data helps you to do away with outdated practices. Exploiting the loads of data available from customer interactions enables companies to price a product correctly. BI can help manage dynamic pricing to improve revenue generation, with the use of real-time inventory and supplier data and correlate it with financial forecasts and customer behavior analysis.

• Decision Making

With CRM data, BI can help unlock various trends around marketing. You get to serve your customers based on their personas, buying behavior, and industry influence. This way you can engage better with them and influence their opinions in favor of your brand.

• Effective Customer Care

With the huge volume of data available with your organization, you can personalize your marketing messages and outreach programs for maximum potential of success. With BI, you can craft multi-channel marketing techniques. This in turn, increase customer engagement, prompt upsell/cross-sell, and improves customer retention.

How CRM can use BI

• Better Data = Better BI

Once the CRM application is synced with a BI solution, you can extract gold-level insights to aid your decision making. If the input CRM data is clean and appropriately consolidated, you will be able to generate intelligent and useful data. The reverse is also true. Hence, CRM data that is maintained diligently can lead to better BI and actionable insights. This can be achieved by incorporating rigorous processes to consolidate the multiple databases in the CRM application.

• Evaluate what you need

The next step is to describe where you are, on the CRM-BI planning and deployment metric. Focus on what supports your business and what impacts your customers. You need not be overwhelmed by fancy BI and analytics technologies if they don’t suit your business objectives.

Take for example, predictive analytics. With CRM data you can add a lot of value to behavioral intelligence and come up with personalized marketing tactics to improve cross-sell and upsell of products

• Plan and grow

You CRM and BI system integration needs to be well-thought of in order to work seamlessly and deliver expected outcomes. You may have constraints of budgets or time, but no rushed implementation can yield the results you are expecting. Hence the integration needs to be a well-planned affair.

CRM applications have the power to work with BI and provide you with a 360-degree view of the customer. Only a word of caution – just because you have the resources with a shiny new CRM-BI solution, don’t go to the extreme and target customers repeatedly in a way that will put them off your brand forever.