Customer Relationship Management

When implementing an Analytics application along with CRM, most companies expect to gain the customer insights from the analytics application, but are they really gaining those insights? Even if the answer is yes, what is the accuracy? In addition to this there is a limitation to the range of insights that can be derived using ACRM. ACRM system has two major limitations:

1. ACRM is mostly developed on CRM data only

2. ACRM is not supported by any statistical models & tools that are designed for deriving a particular insight.

If one looks into the details of conventional analytics implementation one can easily understand that the reports that are generated are mostly to measure the operational efficiency or performance of a department or to an extent support in planning. But that data has to be further analyzed to make some decision but again this will be mostly for corporate level planning like sales planning, marketing planning, target setting, etc rather than for gaining customer insights.

But ICRM starts with an insight that has to be derived, it is modeled to give you an input which one can directly use to take a decision, it can be a probability value or Yes/No decision, etc. ICRM is a framework, it starts with identifying the insight to be derived like, predict probability to churn,  then one has to identify different triggers to churn, then one has to identify various data sources which stores relevant customer data, if the data lies outside the enterprise - build a system to capture that data and build an enterprise OLAP to derive the data from all sources, then model the solution using a statistical modeling tool like SAS, etc and then build the logic in decision support tools like Real Time Decision, which will run on real time data and finally give the exact value to take a decision.

From the technical perspective, Analytical CRM is limited to CRM data base only and uses analytical tools like Siebel Analytics, etc and sits on CRM OLAP. But ICRM sits on Enterprise OLAP, takes data from several data sources, uses statistical modeling tools for modeling the solution and uses decision support tools like RTD, etc. ACRM is only a part of ICRM. ICRM is more accurate and provides exact, ready to use insights for effective decision making.