The vastly accepted classifications of CRM are Operational, Analytical, and Collaborative. These classifications provide a general idea of CRM’s strengths as all types of CRM share the same core features.

We will be talking in detail about all of the above-mentioned classifications, but today we are focusing on Analytical CRM. This software focuses on the systematic electronic analysis of collated customer data. Customer data, which is derived from both online and offline behaviour, is defined as contact data, customer properties and information.

Let us talk about it in detail.

Analytical CRMs

Analytical CRMs are for organisations that want to use data to improve their business and serve their customers. Use of the data can range from gathering it to analysing, reporting, and much more.

The three key features of any analytical CRM are the following:

Data Warehousing and Mining

Almost every analytical CRM keeps your historical and present data in a type of database that can be termed a data warehouse. Such a system is very effective for analysts to gather, integrate, and analyse the data for reporting. Therefore, doing statistical analysis to find patterns in large datasets i.e. data mining becomes easier for your analysts.

These patterns contain insights into customer behaviour, interests, and habits, both for large groups of customers and smaller clusters, giving your organisation a better chance to serve your consumers with products ands services that are relevant to them.

Forecasting

Analysing past activities gives an insight into the future. With Analytical CRMs, you can study past sales trends and forecast what has to come. You can evaluate several approaches and decide what is best.

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

OLAP tools analyse huge amounts of data from multiple perspectives. You can layer different sets of data on top of each other belonging to different dimensions and it is analysed simultaneously. Nevertheless, how does this help you? For example, you are focusing on a certain customer demographic visiting your website from a certain region at a certain time of day only on weekends, and then you want insights into their behaviour and how best to approach them compared to other such audience segments, an OLAP tool is capable of doing that.

Analytical CRMs are useful for businesses looking to gather customer data and leverage it for their acquisition and retention strategies. You can build customer personas and find out the most valuable touchpoints in the customer journey based on data.

Want to Learn More?

We are sure you are interested to learn more about the various classifications of CRM. For that, do check our detailed eBook “CRM Management – Lead Magnet” and start utilising that information today! Our eBook will help you both learn the basics of customer relationship management and how to implement them into your business.