Customer Relationship Data Management Tool for Analysis and Planning

Is your customer relationship management (CRM) software the right tool for analyzing customer data and making actionable plans? According to Workbooks’ survey, 48% of small and medium business CRM users said their initial CRM solution proved to be a poor fit for their business needs. While a CRM excels at certain business processes, other tools are better suited for advanced tasks such as data management, analysis, forecasting, and planning. Let’s take a look:

Customer Relationship Data Management and Analysis

A customer relationship management system is designed to collect mainly first-party customer data and use it to build relationships through brand interactions. A CRM targets both existing and potential customers.

Within its purview, a CRM is still the best and most popular solution. However, when its capabilities are stretched beyond their designated use, many CRM buyers find the performance less than satisfactory. 44% of Workbook’s surveyed participants said that the complexity in migrating data was a major obstacle in their CRM implementation. Many users attempt to work around this function by extracting CRM data and combining it with other datasets before they are able to run an analysis that suits their needs.

Interestingly, contact management is indicated as a CRM’s most important function by 75% of organizations surveyed by Workbook. It follows that to extend a CRM’s function into analysis and forecasting is to court disaster. Insufficient data and inaccurate analyses result in ineffective campaigns.

A more effective solution would use a tool designed for the job: one that cleanses and enriches data automatically, comes with robust analytics capabilities, and is able to activate insights across sales, marketing, and support. Meet the customer data platform.

How a CDP’s Customer Analytics Fits Business Needs

CDPs like Treasure Data’s come with out-of-the-box customer analytics that can be quickly deployed without worrying about data migration. Depending on the current need, Treasure Data CDP can analyze:

• Audience segments and their behavioral attributes
• Probability of customer churn
• Customer lifetime value
• Purchase behavior
• Customer journey analysis

A CDP’s data management and analytical capabilities broaden the range of applications it offers users to fit their business needs.

CDPs Provide Deeper, Better Insights

Unlike a CRM, a customer data platform (CDP) provides reliable insights by leveraging its unified customer database. This foundation is built on a multi-layered collection of datasets from first-party, second-party, and third-party sources. CDPs also ingest real-time, event-level, and streaming data, along with historical information such as a CRM might supply.

A CDP’s rich customer data foundation enables it to draw deep consumer insights compared to a CRM, which relies primarily on first-party data logged by system users. CDPs also automate updates so the data used for analysis is fresh and relevant. On the other hand, the time it takes for CRM users to bring up and export their desired datasets for analysis means the results may already be outdated by the time they are ready to use.

CDP Provides Visibility Into the Customer Journey

A CRM system tells you the basics about a customer: their name, contact information, probable opportunity and value, and conversion data. However, it doesn’t tell you what pages a customer browsed on your website, what blogs they read, or why they abandoned their cart. CRMs also can’t tell you what actions sales and support team members have taken so far to encourage the customer toward conversion. In this regard, a CRM offers no insight into individual customers’ specific journeys.

In contrast, a CDP provides exceptional visibility into a customer’s journey. It can tell you what content they consumed, how they engaged with the brand on social media, or the last time they visited a store. Following a customer’s tracks and comparing them to thousands of other similar journeys, a CDP can deduce what point customers are along their journey and what they need to move forward to conversion. Enterprise-level CDPs like Treasure Data also harness multi-attribution models to pinpoint which channels, campaigns, or touchpoints contribute the most to successful conversions so marketers can allocate resources wisely–and efficiently.

With this breadth and depth of customer journey visibility, brands can meet customers every step of the way and take advantage of opportunities to secure commitment and build loyalty.

In summary, a customer relationship management system excels at contact management and building relationships through certain brand interactions. However, it fails when it comes to robust customer data management and analysis due to its limitations. A CRM is simply not built to be an analytical tool or provide deep consumer insights. A customer data platform is better suited to these jobs, thanks to a strong customer data foundation bolstered by integrated analytical capabilities. A CDP like Treasure Data offers businesses reliable information that addresses current business needs, whether that means checking a lead’s progress, optimizing a campaign for better performance, or activating insights to meet customers’ needs.

With increased customer journey visibility and a powerful recommendation engine, a CDP checks all the boxes for customer relationship data management and analysis.

Revolutionize Your Customer Relationship Data Management and Analysis With Treasure Data Insights

Treasure Data is a best-in-breed customer data platform trusted by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies around the world. Enjoy Treasure Data’s customer relationship data management and analysis capabilities for all your business needs:

• Customer journey visibility and orchestration
• Omnichannel data collection
• Ingestion of real-time, streaming, and historical data
• Centralized customer data storage and access
• Enterprise-grade security and data privacy
• AI and machine learning capabilities
• Predictive analytics
• Propensity modeling
• Next-best action (NBA) recommendation engine

To learn more about how Treasure Data can revolutionize your customer relationship data management and analysis, consult an expert today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call 1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information. test