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How To Use Data Analytics In CRM

Written by Simon Matthews | Feb 26, 2023 10:00:00 PM

When you add data analytics to your CRM, you get a lot of data mining benefits. This is because the amount of data, the types of data, and the speed at which it needs to be processed are all growing at a rate of knots during a typical business day. In this post, we look at how CRM may organise data to make it easier to use and more structured.

Analytics has never been more important than they are now since the benefits of following and analysing digital data trails left by customers depend on presenting the data in a form that is clear and easy to understand. The upside of this include:

  1. Predictive modelling anticipating future buying behaviour and presenting insightful recommendations based on past and present patterns, increasing conversion rates.
  2. Market analysis – a profound understanding of customer bases to conjure new product development and marketing campaigns.
  3. Customer brand perception – identifying how customers perceive brands informs how to improve on flaws and allows marketing and sales strategy renewal and upgrades to enrich customer experience (CX), and acquire and retain customers.
  4. Propelling growth and revenue – precise performance metrics and data management help businesses make informed decisions. Sales generate leads and close deals more quickly and services departments are bolstered with more info at their fingertips via report generation.

CRM analytics for sales positions insights into:

  • Lead drop-out rates at various sales stages
  • Stage length/pipeline analysis
  • Amount, duration and success of sales calls
  • Lead and deal source execution
  • Sales team member performance
  • Loss rates and causes

CRM analytics for marketing helps track

  • Marketing email open rates and intervals
  • Link click-through tempo
  • Social media interaction interfaces
  • Marketing campaign video uptake and drop off

Covered in this article

Steps For Using Data Analytics In CRM
Steps To Clean And Organise Customer Data
Use Data Visualisation Tools To Make Data Insights More Accessible
Use Predictive Analytics To Identify Potential Customer Trends And Patterns
Measure And Analyse The Results Of Your Data Analytics Efforts
The Importance Of Regular Reviewing And Updating CRM Data Analytics Processes And Tools

Steps For Using Data Analytics In CRM:

Define CRM data analytics goals and objectives

To surmise the conversion rates of prospects, the CRM report should designate the percentage of leads converted into sales. This data predicts future revenues, facilitating informed planning.

Outline the best revenue streams

In defining big-ticket opportunities, business ops and revenue can increase with sales also pivoting to new business revenue sources.

Improve customer service

Customers' feelings about the sales team are shown in CRM analytics reports. Use this information to find places to improve and ways to turn a bad customer experience into a good one.

Accurise customer data

Pushing proper marketing content requires being confident the target demographic is the right one. CRM analytics does the heavy lifting for your target to your audience head-on, ensuring your message is personalised accordingly.

Comprehend the pipeline

Not enough emphasis can be put on understanding the sales pipeline – an overview of the customer journey lets you know which stage to work on and how to improve it.

Monitor staff performance

Pinpointing which team members do the heavy lifting to raise company performance is one of the goals of CRM analytics, as is how to help all staff reach their full potential.

Choose The Right Data Analytics Tools And Technologies

Defining a definitive list of criteria is industry-specific, so the following steps narrow it down:

Identify end-goals

A well-defined design strategy is a must. Target a bunch of business problems with the biggest impact on your business you’d like to see resolved, for example, asset monitoring or customer needs of the present, and select the right toolkit for the job.

Research industry use cases

Which analytics, platforms, capabilities and software are your industry-specific colleagues using to mitigate against challenges and ignite prospects? Use AI recommendation engines, sentiment analysis and web scraping to choose or combine event-based, traffic-oriented, content, social media and email marketing analytic tools.

Consider the end-user

Choose from the tools which align with the whole company, from the C-suite to client-facing staff. Evaluate how the analytics tool impacts the company’s diverse roles: users needing streamlined support in decision-making, data science tools or sales and marketing focus.

Customer data platforms connect first, second and third-party data sources; business intelligence tools specialise in predictive modelling, data visualisation, data quality management and ad-hoc modeling;   customer analytic tools provide granular segmentation, acquisition, retention and churn metrics and text analytics; and digital experience platforms feature multi-touch management, automated personalisation through dynamic templates, and content management and delivery.

Clean and organise your customer data

Automated data cleansing and organising may result in bad data through data that is outdated, incorrectly formatted and duplicated. Hygienic data benefits customer service, is easier to access, increases business productivity, delivers prize insights and escalates marketing effectiveness.

Steps To Clean And Organise Customer Data

Solve format issues and set the standard

Format challenges comprise incorrect and incomplete data, and misused acronyms or abbreviations of states, countries, and brand or customer names and email addresses. Upon correction, set the standard format for manual data entry, letting sales and marketing find needed info quickly.

Simplify data fields

A winning marketing campaign uses uniform and customised data. For example, every email must be sent to identical first and last names with identical capitalisations in the same place. Additional information must be accurate. Hence the importance of standardising each database field, deleting wrong info, punctuation or emojis, and getting rid of unverifiable input.  

Merge duplications

The average database can include a quarter of duplicate data. Targeting your audience with the same content more than once and sending multiple iterations of the same offer raises red flags. CRM tools to detect and block duplicate records after manually purging these guarantee consistency. But enforcing a working system will save your data processing team time and energy and help to reduce data storage costs - which in turn can help improve your bottom line.

Some duplicates are partial matches with some overlap among two records, so the CRM tool selects the master single customer view by comparing each entry. It’s impossible to get a 100% clean CRM database, manually or digitally. But enforcing a working system will save your data processing team time and energy.

Use Data Visualisation Tools To Make Data Insights More Accessible


Data visualisation tools are the greatest way to make sense of large information, find business insights, and help make decisions by putting complex data in an easy-to-understand manner. They include graphs, tables, maps, diagrams, scatter plots, radar polygrams, and more. Over time, these tools have become easier to use, easier to get to, and cheaper.

Considerations for picking the best data visualisation tool include training staff on how to use it, the type of data, how sensitive it is to time and how much of it there is, what business questions the tool can answer, and whether it can be used on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. After all, we're wired to understand data better when it's shown visually than when it's just shown as numbers in a spreadsheet. Benefits include better cooperation on data, finding trends and insights, spotting problems and avoiding mistakes, making decisions faster and giving business intelligence a boost.

Use Predictive Analytics To Identify Potential Customer Trends And Patterns


Predictive analytics analyses historical data to predict future patterns and results. It also employs toolsets to extract data to predict changes in the market, which gives organisations a competitive edge. Types of tools include social media analysis to find out how people feel now and in the future, machine learning to predict data anomalies in the future, and natural language processing and sentiment analysis to find out where customers' feelings are going.

Predictive analytics is based on algorithms that examine historical data to find patterns between variables and then look for little changes in the market before they become obvious. Predictable recurrent purchases and conversions develop loyalty to a brand or service and build trust between prospects, consumers, and salespeople. Using a customer's browsing and purchase history can help offer a personalised customer experience that will make each customer happy.

The benefits include, but are not limited to, reducing employee turnover, figuring out which clients are most likely to miss payments, predicting sales, optimising and inverting prices, increasing customer lifetime value through cross-selling and upselling, figuring out how customers will react when nudged to buy more in the future, and adjusting conversion rates.

Measure And Analyse The Results Of Your Data Analytics Efforts


Here, we look at how to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of data analytics. First, find out how many of your customers are using your analytical work. If customers don't use your products and services, it's hard and practically impossible to get an ROI from data analytics. Through business intelligence, you can find out how much money each user visit or crawl is worth. The most reliable and obvious way to tell if data analytics is working is by seeing if sales and income go up.

Second, search for changes caused by reports, analyses, or insights to find data-driven ways to improve. And start a two-way communication channel that helps you measure both incoming and outgoing value propositions, keeping an eye on the changes and reevaluating it to account for the variances. Running a competitor study to take market share back from competitors is an example of inbound. When vendors or stores run out of stock, for instance, this is an example of outbound.

Third, use your feedback loops to figure out how important client suggestions are by giving a monetary value to each point on the customer satisfaction scale. 

Fourth, get the financial performance of small changes to product and service features. For example, the latest taxonomy of your chatbot is good at bringing in money.

Fifth, do a new evaluation of the company's data maturity and give improvements in scaled maturity a rand value. The results will also show which employees are better at working with data (and making money) than others.

The Importance Of Regular Reviewing And Updating CRM Data Analytics Processes And Tools

Reviewing CRM analytics tools on a regular basis lets the business case be updated as the business changes. It also helps the business stay current and competitive by adopting the newest analytic tools and technology. By redefining models, data analytic cause and effect process assessments are easier to grasp. By keeping track of the return on investment (ROI) of data analytics, CRM updates can be based on how the actual results compare to what was expected. This means keeping track of the capital investments and operating costs of the CRM initiative's development, as well as making sure that the investments and costs of keeping it up to date are safe for the future.

Business discipline is needed to keep track of costs and returns and predict when tools will need to be updated. Value stream mapping is one technique to look at the current state of the CRM analytics tool and construct a future state for a sequence of events (future products and services) by figuring out how much time and volume each stage of the tool takes. When you know what the firm might do differently, you can figure out how that change will affect the outcomes of analytic tools.

By keeping track of potential future value maps, firms can figure out how much the decision tree is going to cost with the help of predictive modelling of CRM analytic likely scenarios. The value of information modelling lets you figure out how much a business is likely to benefit from one decision over another. When it's time to update the CRM analytics tool, you should think about capital, security, control, new tool reliability, effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility, scalability, and agility.

Use descriptive analysis (a summary of how well the CRM analytic tool worked), diagnostic analysis (where and why the tool worked or didn't work), predictive analysis (how the tool is likely to be used and the data it will be analysing, such as new transaction data and machine learning algorithms), and prescriptive analysis before deciding on the analytic remodelling update. (a combination of the previous analysis to help decide on new products and business areas to invest in).