It seems like cloud and big data are the only things that exist in today’s IT world. Anywhere you turn you are likely to stumble upon one of these. IT pros are excited about bringing the big data technology into enterprise intelligence to make them smarter. The speculations are on to integrate big data solution to enterprise CRM solution to improve its performance and transform it into business intelligence software.
Most companies now have a CRM system to manage its leads, contacts and sales process. It’s being used by the sales and marketing team to explore more sales opportunities. But in most areas CRM is still limited to be used only as contact management software. It only structures the information inserted in it but misses out the bigger picture. Integrating big data to the system may offer wider perspective to the situation.
What is big data?
According to the definition published in Wikipedia, ‘Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.’
According to IBM, 90% of the total volume of data worldwide was generated during the last two years. From this one can understand the sheer size of the information generated by internet users worldwide on a regular basis. This information includes their personal data, experiences, preferences, thoughts etc. This is a trove of critical information for companies. This can offer in-depth insight about customers which then can be used by the companies to create personalized services for them. Here is why you must consider integrating big data technology to your business.
Improved customer understanding: The CRM solution can be applied to imply logic and define correlation between several sets of data. The CRM solution will be able to offer better insight and will be able to categorize customers based on the findings. This will let a company track its most valued customers so that they receive preferential treatment to extend their lifetime value.
Improved customer service: The analytics will help analyzing performance of the organization in offering sales, marketing and customer support services. It will help improving customer experience and at the same time, evaluating the ROI of CRM application.
Supports decision making: Once you have the statistics evaluating customer-facing operation you can fine tune them accordingly to improve performance. You’ll be able to support your decision with appropriate data and statistics.
Apprehend trends: The insight will help businesses in understanding changing customer trends so that they can plan accordingly. It helps analyzing the past activities of the customer to shed light on his future behavior.
Set benchmark: The big data integrated CRM solution will let the company track how it’s faring over a period time against its competitors. Benchmark analysis on key customer service areas will reveal scopes for improvement in terms of return on investment, customer retention, new businesses acquisition, cost per customer, and more.