Mary is a fixture of the fashion and lifestyle industry. After some thorough research on CRM and BI tools, she decides to invest in a CRM business intelligence to improve relationships with her clients. After implementing the solution, she can consolidate customer and purchase data in a centralized location to serve her clients better.

Compare BI Software Leaders

She can track sales and browsing histories to tailor marketing campaigns based on customer preferences. She can delight her customers with seasonal offers and promotions while personalizing their shopping experiences. In effect, she can achieve her quarterly goals to boost revenue and create long-term relationships with her clients.

This Article Covers:

• Differences Between CRM and Business Intelligence
• The Need for CRM Business Intelligence Integration
• Benefits
• Use Cases

CRM vs. Business Intelligence

CRM solutions are consumer-centric designed platforms that handle every aspect of sales. Its responsibilities include:

• Marketing products and services
• Curating a personalized buyer’s journey
• Offering a seamless consumer experience
• Providing robust support services

In the competitive landscape, business goals aren’t limited to hitting sales targets per quarter but also building long-term customer relations.

CRM was born out of the need to create better customer relationships to survive in the global market. By leveraging CRM software, you can store customer information and retain loyal buyers while catering to their needs, desires and preferences.

On the contrary, BI informs strategic business decisions. With the evolution of media and customer power, the size of the data grew exponentially. The data was unstructured and incomprehensible. It was imperative to tame this data to deliver valuable insights. This is when BI came into the picture. Business intelligence involves analyzing external and internal data to generate comprehensive reports.

BI isn’t centered around one specific aspect of business. It focuses on the business as a whole. It’s possible to feed data from CRM systems and create intuitive visualizations to gauge trends and make customer-driven decisions.

In terms of reporting, BI and CRM tools differ in their treatment of source data. BI tools consolidate data from multiple sources for ad hoc reporting. These reports consist of charts, graphs, maps and infographics to present insights and trends.

On the other hand, CRM systems can only access the data stored in connected databases. With older systems, it was possible to source only the data stored in the same database. If the data existed in external databases, these systems couldn’t access it to provide real-time reports.

Nowadays, solution providers offer robust integration capabilities to make CRMs a single source of customer-related information.

The Need for CRM Business Intelligence Integration

Integrating CRM and business intelligence can offer potent benefits. You will be able to:

• Retain customers and improve relationships.
• Conduct robust analysis to make data-driven decisions.
• Boost revenue and profits.
• Mitigate churn.

CRM solutions consolidate and organize customer and prospect information, manage marketing campaigns, identify opportunities and record service issues. In a nutshell, a CRM system helps you stay connected to customers, nurture relationships and boost profits.

BI solutions accumulate data from several sources, including marketing, billing and customer service systems, to track trends, gauge performance gaps, recognize opportunities and make data-driven decisions.

Integrating CRM with business intelligence can provide valuable insights into customer portfolios and help you run targeted ad campaigns to boost sales and conversions.

Compare Top CRM Software Leaders

Primary Benefits

Let’s look at the benefits of CRM and business intelligence integration:

Understand Customers

Understanding customer needs is vital. When you understand your customers, you can curate robust strategies tailored to their specific interests to entice them toward your brand.

Knowing your customers requires some understanding of where they are coming from, how they prefer to interact with your business, which social media channels they use and more. You should be able to track customer interactions across various touchpoints to gauge sales and marketing processes effectively.

Ensure Dynamic Pricing

CRM with business intelligence integrations eliminates outdated pricing practices. Leverage customer interaction data to price products and services accurately. Manage dynamic pricing to boost revenue with the aid of real-time inventory information to ensure accurate forecasts.

Foster Decision-making

CRM solutions store huge amounts of customer data to analyze market trends, customer preferences, buying behavior, preferred shopping hours, industry influencers, favorite brands and more. With valuable data available at your fingertips, you can interact with customers in a way they prefer and influence their opinions.

Facilitate Segmentation

Segment customers into four different buckets.

Integrating CRM and BI solutions ensures better customer segmentation based on their preferences and demographics. It allows you to identify unexplored markets to boost product sales and target the right audience.

Optimize Customer Reach

It’s possible to implement multichannel marketing strategies and outreach programs with customized messaging to enhance consumer experiences, increase sales and retain customers.

Create Loyalty Programs

Design loyalty programs to offer benefits and preserve profitable customers. A well-designed loyalty program can attract new customers, mitigate turnover and drive profits.

Compare BI Software Leaders

Use Cases

Let’s look at some of the use cases of business intelligence in CRM solutions:

Customer Service

Identify problems that affect customer service, including order delays, prolonged response times for information requests, complaint sources and more. A robust CRM solution helps you serve key customers and gauge buying behavior for various segments.

Sales

Provide useful insights into sales team performance. Create real-time dashboards to monitor performance and track metrics like total sales, lead conversion rates, revenue, average deal size, quota attainment and more. Personalize dashboards for each salesperson to track progress against predefined objectives.

Marketing

CRM solutions help you sift through contact databases to target lucrative customers. They allow you to segment customers based on recent purchases, likes and dislikes, social media activities and more. Based on segmentation, you can run personalized marketing campaigns to generate revenue.

Create intuitive dashboards to track marketing metrics, including website traffic, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer retention rate, revenue growth and more.

Human Resource Management

Track employee performance, monitor objectives, recommend training programs, establish vacation schedules and ensure resource optimization using CRM with business intelligence integration.

Compare Top CRM Software Leaders

Conclusion

CRM and business intelligence solutions are powerful tools that play a vital role in amplifying business performance. Instead of choosing one over the other, it’s wise to harness both to optimize customer relationships.

How has CRM business intelligence helped you enhance customer relationships? Let us know in the comments below!