CRM Analytics: Reaching the Heart of the CRM Process

TAKING THE PULSE OF YOUR CUSTOMER INTERACTIONS

As reported by Rose Palmer, keep tabs on your customers and products. Gain knowledge and insight to deliver service consistently and according to your customer's value. Turn data into strategy. Using PeopleSoft's suite of customer relationship management (CRM) Analytics, you can take the pulse of your customer interactions so you can drive actions and change behavior -- in a heartbeat.

Understanding your customers has never been as important -- or as easy. "One of the factors driving the growth of customer relationship management analytics," according to Joshua Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting of Daly City, California, "is the desire to get a deeper understanding of customers. The most competitive companies are finding ways to use the new level of information provided by analytic products to improve the effectiveness of all of their customer interactions."

PeopleSoft CRM Analytics applications deliver the knowledge and insight that is essential for turning customer information into strategy and competitive advantage. Leading ultimately to profitable and collaborative relationships with your customers. Our end-to-end suite includes the tools, the environment, and the integration-all the functions you need to simplify the task of gathering the data needed to measure CRM performance drivers. Enabling you to concentrate on making the decisions that make your organization successful.

Using our award-winning PeopleSoft Enterprise Warehouse as a central data repository, PeopleSoft CRM Analytics incorporate the greatest breadth of data available. Enabling the most integrated suite of analytic applications that cover the entire spectrum of operations within an enterprise.

How Does It Work?

PeopleSoft CRM Analytics include five applications, all accessible via a web browser. Integrating data from throughout your organization -- from PeopleSoft CRM and enterprise applications, home-grown systems, and external data providers-our CRM Analytics provide interactive, comparative, and multidimensional analysis for marketing, sales, and support activities.

Using extract, transform, and load (ETL) technology, the system first extracts the customer data such as leads from marketing campaigns, deals that your salespeople are working on, cases that support agents have open, and order management information from the back office. To complete the picture, the system can also extract industry data sourced from external data providers. The system loads the data into the Enterprise Warehouse where it's stored in a consistent format so that it can all be analyzed and used by the CRM Analytics products and your end users. The Enterprise Warehouse manages the data, calculates performance metrics, and provides Web access to the information via a variety of certified analytic tools.

Content is delivered directly to you without the need for IT resources. You can view information at a high level to know, for example, that the average selling price of a product was lower than you wanted. Then drill down to specifics to see analysis of sales data that can tell you when, where, and by whom the product was being heavily discounted. With this refined content, you'll get a complete picture of a customer or product. Now you can initiate action on outstanding issues and make more informed and accurate decisions regarding your operations.

Was That Last Marketing Campaign Successful?

Identifying and measuring the success of marketing activities is one of the most subjective processes. PeopleSoft's Marketing Insight helps you know when you've been successful and how. From performance of marketing activities and campaigns, to converting leads to actual sales, to budget reports. With Marketing Insight you know how effective your marketing dollars are and can see an ROI for your marketing investment.

Are You Going to Meet Your Sales Projections This Quarter? Profitability starts with revenues, and revenues start with sales. Understanding and managing your sales resources and your sales process is a significant key to your success. PeopleSoft Sales Activity Insight gives you the information you need to improve and perform to your revenue forecasts. To analyze your sales cycle so you can see where time is being spent, where prospects are falling out, and where resources are needed. Because you can't afford to guess when it comes to sales.

Big Customers = Big Profits?

The cost to serve and support big customers may make them your least profitable, but how will you know? PeopleSoft's Profitability Insight offers the most extensive profitability analysis around, using back-office financials, sophisticated cost management techniques, and customer-facing information. Identify the areas that are driving profits and drill-down to pinpoint key information about customers, products, and sales and support channels. Develop strategies to enhance your revenues, fine-tune your programs, and maintain profitable relationships with your clients.

Are You Serving Up Effective Support?

A customer's experience with your support center is a key to keeping them satisfied and referenceable. PeopleSoft's Support Insight enables you to know exactly how your support center is performing. It even interacts with sales information to let you know whether clients in your sales pipeline have open or escalated support cases that might impact your sales efforts.

Keeping Score

The PeopleSoft Customer Scorecard ties all the content together from marketing, sales, profitability, and support so you can communicate the goals and objectives to home in on. Customer Scorecard's prepackaged key performance indicators (KPIs) and high-level dashboard give executives a quick and accurate summary of how their organization is proceeding toward its goals. KPIs are the literal measurements you identify as critical to achieving the corporate vision. Suppose your critical success factor is to improve financial returns. The metrics indicate that your marketing expenses were too high last year so your KPI would be to reduce marketing expenses by at least five percent. If you're below that goal, you'll be alerted with a red indicator on your scorecard. You can do some basic research through the scorecard to find out why, or click on a link to the Insight products for deeper investigations.

Closing the Loop

Analytic information is of no use unless it can be turned to into action. PeopleSoft 8 technology and PeopleSoft CRM Analytics make it easier than ever to turn analytic results into operational decisions. For instance, customer profitability rankings determined by Profitability Insight can be sent to the support desk database. From there, those rankings can be used to prompt service agents to provide superior support for highly profitable clients.

Powerhouse Analytics From A Single Vendor

Customers have many reasons to choose PeopleSoft CRM Analytics. Single vendor approach to support. Breadth of offerings inside and outside of CRM. Complementary and integrated PeopleSoft CRM best-of-breed products. As an enterprise vendor offering enterprise management, CRM, and HR solutions, PeopleSoft offers a comprehensive view for you to gain insight into opportunities to increase customer loyalty and maximize profitability.