Page 97 - DMGT510_SERVICES_MARKETING

Services Marketing

Notes  Customer acquisition and targeted selling, for additional profiling, segmentation and
ranking of customers based on the propensity to buy, order frequency, and overall
purchasing behaviour.
With this, businesses can apply specialized metrics to segment customers and then build
specific promotions or sales efforts around select customer-groups.
Customer management, for understanding the impact of order fulfilment, returns and call-

centre activity on actual sales performance. This will allow companies to review year-to-
date sales and revenue and problems reported by customers to identify correlations and
better understand how customer service issues are impacting profits.
Additionally, analytics could also be used to measure:
Sales Performance Management;

Marketing Performance Management;

Manufacturing Performance Management;

Procurement Performance Management;

e-Business Performance Management;

Customer Relationships and

Activity Cost Management.
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Technology Drivers

A formal CRM technology solution is not required to implement a customer-relationship
analytics program. What is required is some level of integration between customer-facing
applications – such as call-centre or Web systems – and back-end systems. Front office systems
providing data pertaining to customer transactions and inquiries can be matched up with back-
end financial systems that have records of customer credit and invoices. In addition, many
companies already have components of CRM systems, such as sales automation systems that
record customer-contact information. Data can come from a variety of sources — call centres,
point of sale transactions, Web click stream data, back-end databases, and even faxes and phone
records. Data from these channels is integrated into a customer-oriented data mart or data
warehouse, a knowledge base that continuously captures customer data. While some integrated
CRM solutions do provide this capability, companies still need the tools that will take this
composite data and paint a picture about their customers.
A customer-relationship analytics system is a set of tools that are run against this data to perform
business intelligence functions — reporting, analysis and data mining. Such tools can help
marketers visualize, through online graphics, patterns and relationships in customer behaviour
and trends. A number of variables can be measured through this data analysis engine, including
net profitability, return patterns, and order-fill rates.

Example: A company may find that a particular customer segment to which it has been
aggressively marketing also has a high return rate for products - thereby diminishing the
profitability of this effort. It may also find that its best customers are being treated the worst
because it is not able to find out who its best customers are and may not be able to judge the level
of attention their business merits.
To have a successful impact on your CRM program, an analytics system needs to be speedily
speedy accessible, and user-friendly. While customer – relationship analytic systems may employ

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