In today’s tough economic times, companies are striving to improve sales, marketing, and service efficiency and effectiveness to drive profitable revenue growth. Executives are realizing that to gain a competitive advantage, they need a holistic view of the business instead of managing it in functional silos. Equally important is making sure the chosen application also meets the needs of both the business user and IT—some of which I’ll cover here.
The Business-User Perspective of Customer Analytics
Business users need customer analytic applications that:
- Combine data from different functional silos
- Create a collaborative workspace for managers to share information and refine strategies
- Provide actionable insight from high-level aggregate trends
- Allow users to drill down for detailed metrics
- Enable better decision making across all stages of customer lifecycle, so they can:
- Identify more strategic and tactical initiatives to improve net margin
- Provide actionable insight on how to optimize the product/channel/customer mix
- Pinpoint the most profitable customer segments to focus on and the most effective ways of serving them
- Manage overall sales strategy execution relative to objectives, including identifying and responding to at-risk deals
- Drive sales effectiveness with pipeline insight
- Help sales to meet and exceed quotas by identifying appropriate prospects to target and solutions to present to existing customers
- Allocate marketing funds effectively
- Know campaign progress/effectiveness and the tactics used to generate more leads
- Analyze service effectiveness to improve customer service and retention
The IT Perspective of Customer Analytics
To resonate with IT, customer analytic applications should:
- Leverage the existing IT environment and infrastructure
- Derive greater business value from the existing business and operational process
- Maximize predictability of project scope, cost, and risk with predefined best experiences and deployment expertise
- Minimize IT’s development and maintenance effort
To get maximum ROI on these analytic applications, it’s important that business users and IT work together to identify the best applications for meeting business requirements while being easy to integrate and implement.
Does your application meet both business and IT needs? How are you using customer analytics to improve sales, marketing, and service?
