Customer Analytics Consulting
Transform Customer Data Into Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset
What We Can Achieve Together
Use Business Intelligence to Improve Customer Engagement
Deliver the right message at every customer moment of truth; that is every point where the customer decides whether to accept or forego a company communication, offer, proposal or other engagement.
Analytics show the optimal combination of content, offer, channel and timing for every customer.
Use Analytics to Improve Company Decision Making
When you deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, that person makes better and more timely business decisions.
Business Intelligence (BI) can shift a company culture from intuitive, subjective and gut-based decision making to data-driven, fact-based and objective decisions.
Use Predictive Analytics to Engineer the Future
A recurring pattern among low growth companies is that they don't know what actions deliver the biggest financial returns, so they pursue what they know instead of what is most effective.
CRM predictive analytics perform pro forma modeling to compare alternatives and plot the shortest path to the desired destination.
The More You Know the Faster You Grow
Many companies are data rich and information poor. They know data should be their most valuable company asset but struggle to transform it from an unused byproduct to an information asset.
According to a McKinsey research report, "The impact of customer analytics on corporate performance is significant—and clearly underestimated" as "Companies that make extensive use of customer analytics are more likely to outperform their competitors on key performance metrics, whether profit, sales, sales growth, or return on investment. For example, companies that use customer analytics comprehensively report outstripping their competition in terms of profit almost twice as often as companies that do not."
Customer Relationship Management software is the customer system of record. It's also a platform application with powerful tools such as customer data management, extensible dashboards, predictive models, and AI.
Here are four tools that we routinely use to help clients apply data to improve customer engagement, grow customer relationships and increase both customer share and retention.
Industry Benchmarks
Industry performance benchmarks show what good looks like. They bring context to performance measures.
For example, if your sales conversion rate is 46%, is that good? Well, not if the average in your industry is 48.5%. And when multiplied by the volume of sale opportunities this could be a significant deviation that would otherwise go unnoticed and unresolved.
Aligning performance measures with industry benchmarks will quickly spot gaps or underperforming areas that offer the biggest uplift opportunities.
That's important because when managers have both visibility and measurability to the most significant gaps between their current state and where they want to be, they can make a very effective case for change and plot the most direct route to those improvements.
Benchmarking turns competitive knowledge into competitive advantage.
Customer Dashboards
From over two decades of customer analytics work, we can tell you that dashboards are the top decision support tool for most of your staff. A properly designed dashboard will get the most user adoption because it's the delivery tool to get the right information to the right person at the right time.
However, an obstacle with packaged CRM dashboards is that they often display what is easy but not what is most important. For example, high impact key performance indicators such as ICP (ideal customer profile) fit, CLV (customer lifetime value), account engagement score and customer health score are not available in most CRM systems. That means to apply these powerful measures you will need to create them as calculated objects or entities.
Predictive Analytics
Data becomes more actionable when it evolves from historical to predictive. In fact, without CRM predictive analytics, all of your information reporting is entirely backward looking.
These tools increase customer profitability at scale. They examine customer history to identify events, transactions, occurrences or patterns of behaviors that predict whether a marketing offer will convert, a sale opportunity will close, or a customer will churn.
Or they can forecast the financial impact of reducing customer churn.
Even better, they can be used to engineer financial outcomes. For example, the below revenue engineering model is depicted as a predictive pyramid and supported by metrics that roll up from the lowest level of execution to achieve the company's top priorities (i.e., in this case revenue growth).
There are many potential pathways to your goals but using a model such as the one below identifies the most direct route that can be accomplished in the least time and cost and with the least risk.
This type of pro forma model is helpful because no business process or program lives in isolation. Each has cascading effects that impact many areas and those impacts must be considered when making tradeoffs. This visualization is extremely helpful in determining where to invest your limited time to achieve the biggest financial uplift.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is effective at sifting through large volumes of data and delivering highly specific insights and recommendations that are just not possible otherwise.
This technology converts data to forward looking information such as next best answer, next best action or similar guided recommendation. Giving staff information they don't know or delivering insights which aid their productivity shifts their behaviors and improves business outcomes.
But we know from working with clients that AI is often viewed a broad and deep topic, with complexity that sometimes prevents getting started. This need not be the case.
You can start small with a high impact use case, show success with measurable value, and use that payback to fund continued investment. We often do this using the below proof of concept model.
Many managers were early adopters in AI and gained both competitive advantages and impressive ROI. However, AI is no longer in the early days. We crossed that chasm and any company not using AI today is clearly substituting labor for technology.
Data is the fuel, AI is the engine, and insights are the destination.
Customer Analytics Consulting
Helping clients turn customer data into their most valuable asset is our business.
Our customer analytics consultants help clients convert data from a raw material to a finished good in the form of information or insight.
We apply tools such as Salesforce to help clients use data to advance information along a continuum → from seeing "what happened" to understanding "why it happened" to predicting "what will happen" and ultimately, knowing "what should happen and what should I do next". This evolution creates the intelligent enterprise.
We are experts with business intelligence technologies such as Salesforce Einstein and the Salesforce Analytics Cloud and have the repeatable processes to connect data, insights, action and outcomes.
Engage with our Customer Analytics Consultants
We welcome an introductory call with a customer analytics consultant to discuss the options that best achieve your goals.