Understanding the way customers interact with marketing efforts, products and the brand as a whole is an agelong challenge in the business world. This applies both to acquisition – turning prospects into customers – and retention – existing customers renewing their subscription or making additional purchases. For eons, businesses have struggled to understand how to drive consumer engagement and product usage; but the digital age, with its abundance of measurable data and metrics, has eliminated much of the guesswork by allowing companies to track user behavior and potential pain points.
What CRM Can Teach Businesses About Their Clientele
One of the most useful components in today’s corporate toolset is customer relationship management (CRM) software, which enables the marketing, sales, and support teams to follow clients throughout their proverbial lifecycle – from lead to opportunity to account. Tools such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics can provide heaps of insights by tracking various interaction between consumers and organizations (both automated and manual).
For example, CRM helps companies determine the effectiveness of marketing campaigns: by enabling the business to see where its opportunities are being generated, and which marketing efforts have been bringing in the best results, organizations gain a deeper look into which promotions resonate with which customers.
Later on, CRM will be used to monitor client relationships: CRM will typically track and record interactions between representatives to customers, allowing businesses to understand these types of exchanges and how they affect the customer’s relationship with the business.
Why CRM Is Not Enough
Certainly, there is a world of knowledge to be gained just from CRM data (evident by the fact that many midsized and large companies are now hiring experts and consultants solely for the task of operating their CRM systems). However, to truly understand customers, companies need to take this data and combine it with the data being generated by the multitude of additional systems and tools that typically being used for customer-facing operations.
These can include:
- Marketing automation software
- Customer service software
- Call center data
- Web marketing analytics
The fact of the matter is, these types of systems are actually where a lot of the interactions between companies and organizations are taking place. And while each of these tools collects data that can later be analyzed, even stronger insights can be reached by combining these various datasets. Since each of source presents a partial picture, focused on its specific areas of operation, it is only by merging them into a single, centralized view that the business can truly see the full picture of its customers’ behaviors and reactions.
Since CRM software includes a lot of crucial data points throughout the customer’s lifecycle, such as the time and way the customer was acquired, subscription renewals and account details, it can serve as a great starting point and basis for cross-referencing and examining additional data sources. This process, which previously would have required tedious work across several spreadsheets and formats, is streamlined through the use of business intelligence software which can automatically join multiple data sources. Furthermore, different datasets can now be presented not merely side by side, but as part of a centralized repository which enables analysts to understand the relationships between various data points originating from different systems.
To understand how this can be applied in practice, let’s look at the types of insights we can reach by combining data from two of the most popular CRM and customer service platforms: Salesforce and Zendesk.
Use Case: Salesforce and Zendesk
For the purposes of our example we’ll envision a SaaS company working on a subscription model, which uses these two tools for the following goals:
- Salesforce: shows account status and history in terms won\lost deals, and could also include information such as deal size, number of opportunities within the organization, type of business and retention status. Salesforce can both present this data for a specific account, as well as show trends and a general overview of the business’s operations in these aspects.
- Zendesk is used to track efforts to service customers: support tickets opened and answered, average time to close tickets, average tickets per organization, and type of ticket. Again, this data can be both granular and general (e.g. tickets opened vs. time to close during the past 3 months).
As can be seen, both of these applications track acutely different aspects of the customer’s interaction with the company. One displays outcomes in terms of transactions, whereas the other shows efforts to service customers but not the effect these efforts eventually had on renewal rates.
By combining these two datasets, the company now sees the correlations between the quality of its customer service and its customer retention:
The following report presents new data and potential insights, including:
- Total and average tickets vs. lost\won opportunities
- Average deal size and number of support tickets for won vs. lost opportunities
- Top won\lost opportunities in terms of tickets opened
- Trend of average tickets opened vs. lost opportunities
Thus, our SaaS company could understand the relationship between the effectiveness of its customer support efforts (e.g. the amount of support tickets opened and closed, average time to close tickets, etc.) and the amount of deals it manages to close. Resource allocation and other operational factors can be adjusted accordingly. And to reiterate: the company could only truly “see” this new data by merging CRM and customer service data. Neither of the two platforms, by themselves, could have provided these insights.
Looking Beyond CRM
The above example was just one specific use case of combining CRM data with an additional data source. Other systems are used to track interactions between customers and organizations in different areas (such as Google Analytics which shows how visitors interact with the company’s webpage), and combining the data they generate with CRM data could provide different types of insights.
At the bottom line, an organization that wants to take its customer relationships seriously, and to truly gain a bird’s-eye view of its customers and prospects’ behaviors, must look beyond CRM and adopt a broader, integrative data strategy which takes its multitude of data sources into account.
