What You'll Learn
Imagine that your frontline sales rep or service agent has contextual guidance to questions like “What is the next best product to recommend?” or "Which customer cases do I need to prioritize?” or “Is this customer at risk for attrition? What steps can I take to mitigate that?”
With CRM Analytics, the answers can be right in front of you.
What is CRM Analytics?
CRM (customer relationship management) analytics turns increasing, and often siloed, data into connected, actionable insights. These insights allow customer-facing teams to prioritize effectively, collaborate smoothly, and drive stronger business results through repeatable processes. CRM Analytics empowers businesses to make data-informed decisions with confidence.
CRM Analytics platforms save time and cost to serve by showing the full story of how customers are engaging with your business. By providing you with the right insights at the right time, your CRM platform is more than just a system of record. It’s a tool that actively supports sales reps and service agents by connecting all their data and bringing it to life with intuitive visuals and predictive insights. This maximizes your CRM investment by helping teams be more productive with actionable answers and tailored customer interactions.
Throughout this guide, we will look at how sales and service teams can leverage CRM Analytics to transform the customer experience.
Chapter 1 Build stronger customer relationships with data
Today's business world has been fundamentally transformed by the convergence of digital and physical worlds, but one thing remains true — relationships are king. Developing authentic customer relationships has become paramount for business growth.
More and more customers make purchasing decisions based on factors beyond the product or service. They look for companies they connect with, or that have values that align with their own. They’re also looking for unique brand experiences. In fact, 78% of customers are more likely to repurchase from companies that personalize experiences.
To successfully provide unique and personalized experiences, however, you must first learn your customers’ habits and preferences. You need a comprehensive, real-time understanding of how customers are engaging with your business across marketing, sales, and service touchpoints.
This is where an effective CRM Analytics platform really has an impact — making sense of vast amounts of data and quickly surfacing relevant information so sales and service teams can create a remarkable experience that ultimately drives loyalty and revenue. Of course, nothing takes the place of listening with empathy, but being armed with contextual data can create the perfect intersection between empathy and efficiency.
Sales
How do sales managers benefit from CRM Analytics?
Susan Emerson, Senior Vice President, Product GTM at Salesforce, said, “There’s no shortage of data out there for any company. The issue is finding the data that you need when you need it.”
Sales managers need to see performance from so many dimensions — by channel, by product, agent, customer, resolution status, and more.
CRM Analytics puts CRM data to work, taking sales managers straight to insights and trends. It transforms data into actionable, contextual insights that drive day-to-day, lead-to-lead, opportunity-to-opportunity, customer-to-customer, and case-to-case decisions. The best CRM Analytics democratizes decisions and drives agent behaviors and outcomes.
Service
How do service managers benefit from CRM Analytics?
Contact centers measure everything. Because service professionals typically engage with customers when they’re needing support, they’re in an unparalleled position to transform the customer experience.
CRM Analytics empowers service teams with a single source of truth for every customer as soon as an interaction begins, for both remote staff and in-house customer service reps. Real-time access to this data provides insight into the customer’s relationship with the business, what issues they’ve had in the past, and their satisfaction levels. And with actionable insights, service teams can be more efficient to respond to customer needs, and identify opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.
That access can be valuable for agent coaching, self-service channels, and call deflection that increase sales, boost revenue, and create happy customers.
ENGIE builds strong customer relationships and a greener future.
For ENGIE to achieve its mission of a carbon-neutral world, it must first unify its data and team members worldwide. The solution is a single, shared view of customer data through CRM Analytics that reimagines sales and service processes to build deeper customer relationships through digital-first personalization.
What are the benefits of CRM Analytics?
CRM Analytics can unite your sales and service teams around a single, shared view of the customer and boost productivity. Comprehensive, contextual insights and recommendations will drive your business to increase sales and boost revenue every day.
Benefits for Sales
- Give sales teams a complete, 360-degree view of the customer.
- Recommend high-opportunity deals to focus on.
- Help accurately forecast sales to understand performance and address pipeline gaps quickly.
Benefits for Service
- Lead service teams to prioritize the most pressing issues from important customers and identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.
- Optimize service center efficiency with faster time to resolution and customer churn prediction and mitigation.
Learn how Salesforce can help maximize all the benefits of a powerful CRM Analytics platform.
12 years strong — Tableau is a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.
Chapter 2 Bring insights into the flow of work
Data matters, but only if you can decipher and easily access it in your everyday workflow. Most companies have siloed data in multiple systems and often use traditional tools like spreadsheets to make sense of their data. This creates a disjointed experience for their employees who need to see multiple datasets in one place to get the full picture.
Data naturally lives everywhere. It’s increasing exponentially and is generated by nearly all of your systems. The average enterprise has 900 applications, and only one-third are connected. It takes 35 applications on average for just one customer interaction. It is no wonder that nine out of 10 IT leaders say that these data silos have created business challenges. (Source: 2022 Connectivity benchmark report )
The best CRM Analytics tools address those challenges by infusing more curated insights into business processes and workflows. Plus, as each customer interaction generates more input, a wellspring of information feeds the CRM to build on existing insights. This improves customer engagement for employees across departments. With CRM Analytics, all of that intelligence can be incorporated into the flow of everyday work, without having to change systems to see it.
Service
How can sales teams identify clearer opportunities with contextual data?
According to the Salesforce State of Sales report, 77% of sales reps don't have enough time to seek out customer insights. By bringing data and analytics into their everyday workflows, salespeople can better forecast demand and manage sales pipelines anytime, all from one source.
Contextual, actionable, visual, and predictive insights from CRM Analytics transform the CRM experience for sales. It can:
- Drive productivity and consistent, repeatable sales execution across teams.
- Make day-to-day selling easier by providing contextual sales engagement based on customers’ past actions.
- Help newer sales reps gain experience with guided predictive insights.
Service
How can service teams use data insights to improve service outcomes?
Service agents equipped with data from a CRM Analytics tool can see a full history of customer interactions — including revenue profile, customer health and sentiment, and purchase history — that can inform upsell opportunities. This prepares agents to engage customers based on their unique needs.
A service agent with immediate, proactive insights into each customer’s history can resolve issues faster. Plus, visual components of the history can reduce the mental overhead of consuming and processing too much information as agents try to get a full picture of the customer.
When insights are all in one place, service agents can enjoy each interaction more and feel like superheroes for their customers. Agent satisfaction plays a key role in service productivity. Equipping service teams with the tools to bring data into their everyday workflows is the way to create happier customers and more productive staff.
With CRM Analytics, Stanley Healthcare brought together disjointed data and empowered sales to use it in the flow of their everyday work.
A division of Stanley Black & Decker, Stanley Healthcare brings data visibility, improved security, and operational efficiency to healthcare organizations. With the help of CRM Analytics, Stanley Healthcare was able to deliver sales-centric insights — including solution-based account analysis, stacked rankings, and true-versus-weighted pipeline measurement — to understand the unique variables impacting a rep's accounts.
Challenges of CRM Analytics
Analytics tools that take the guesswork out of customer engagement.
When you’re in sales or service, your CRM is the center of your universe. But too often, analytics tools live outside of CRMs where sales and service teams spend most of their time. Context and tool switching can be tough and time-consuming. With CRM Analytics, teams get the insights they need to engage with their customers, deliver solutions, and win more business with ease.
- Get a complete view of the customer by combining CRM data with the rest of a company’s data.
- Bring insights into everyday workflows with a complete source of truth for customers that is accessible to any department, anytime, anywhere.
- Organized in easy-to-read dashboards, anyone at any skill level can find and interpret data and take the right action for both customers and the company.
Learn how Salesforce can help you bring data into the flow of work for any team in any department.
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