Analytical CRM

Companies are striving to understand their customer better through analysing various patterns and trends. This sort of technique call analytical CRM.

In the SAS-analytical CRM white paper, it shows why companies changes the management from product-focus to customer focus. It also explains some of the techniques that apply in analytical CRM. These consist of data warehousing, data mining, OLAP and various decision support tools.

However, does analytical CRM really live up to the expectation of the company or the user? Do they provide on-going value to the company in this ever-changing environment. According to some case studies such as the one written by Arnott about the financial services. The cost involved in the project was enormous yet the benefits that it finally realized wasn't that great. Other cases also suggested that the cost of using analytical CRM does not always enable the manager to better off manage the company and on-going value is usually non-existence.

I believe in terms of analytical CRM, it might provide value only to the large companies where understanding individual customer is hard. For medium to small size companies, the cost of having one analytical CRM will usually outstripped the benefits it provides. The fund invested in the infrastructures and technologies are better off invested in other initiatives that consequently increase the customer satisfaction

Likewise, for small company, it is easier to understand the customer as the company will usually have small customer base and the customer behaviour can be understand through routine communication. Reflecting back to previous week where we were discussing getting to know customer in CRM article, I believe it is not always analytical CRM is not always the best method but it can be one of the input. Nevertheless, the cost of getting one such infrastructure should be deeply consider.