Answer:
Ideally, every one of your employees should be able to provide highly personalized service to every one of your customers. An extended and comprehensive understanding of your customers is the basis of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). While this might be feasible for smaller organizations, it's next to impossible for larger companies unless they use a collaborative technology to support customer interactions.
Being able to leverage customer understanding throughout your business is critical, and there's no better technology to deliver that understanding than the internet. If the only thing your employees need is a browser to access critical customer information, they're in a much better position to exceed customer expectations and ultimately drive the profitability of your business. Moreover, if you're able to extend this same ability outside your company to your suppliers, partners, and customers, you've broadened your prospects even further. A pure internet-based system delivers this opportunity.
It's also important to remember that customer information exists everywhere: in billing systems, in shipping systems - everywhere. And your business needs to seamlessly integrate that customer information across your organization. Having a consistent, customer-centered, end-to-end business process is obtainable only through solutions engineered with these objectives.
CRM analytics provide yet another way in which a company can optimize its customer interactions. Analytics are a critical component of any customer-facing solution. Of course, a true analytical solution is very different from simple reporting. Reporting just gives me access to static data. Analytical tools, on the other hand, bring information together in unique ways that allow me to make optimal decisions that lead to greater profitability.
Locate Your Best Customers
Let me give you an example. I may have a listing of all my customers. But what if I also have the ability to go into that list in real-time and ask, "Which are the most profitable and which are the most unprofitable customers?" An important part of the answer probably resides in the billing system and other systems that support my business. I need to bring all of that information together to know how I'm going to deploy the resources of my organization. I may even want to disengage from the unprofitable customers, whereas I certainly want to make sure that I'm doing everything I can to address that top echelon of my most profitable customers.
Never before have your customers' expectations been higher. Technologies such as pure internet delivery, embedded analytics, and seamless integration of information position companies to exceed their customers' expectations--and drive their profitability.
One key aspect of analytics is the incorporation of an enterprise view of the data. Once again, you have to recognize that customer data doesn't belong just in my CRM solution. As a business owner, I want to be able to access it from my financials solution. I want to access it from my supply chain solution. Only then can I have a complete understanding of customer profitability, product profitability, and channel effectiveness.
Act on Your Information
On a related note, it makes a big difference to a company if customers are paying their bills on time. So the ability to go into receivables and bring payment information into the total customer picture enables me to make a completely informed decision. Organizations have a tremendous amount of data: information about customers, products, channels, all the components of their business. Analytics bring it all together in a meaningful way; they give you the ability to make predictions about purchasing patterns, leading to more profitable activities. Analytics take static data and make it information that you, as the business owner, can act on.
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