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Innoveer Solutions, a customer strategy and solutions consultancy, provides advanced customer management services to high-technology and healthcare companies, among others, in the areas of planning and strategy, technology implementation, and optimization.For years, companies have been amassing sales, service, and marketing data. Now, however, many -- driven to further increase their competitive advantage and market share -- are utilizing business intelligence (BI) tools to transform customer data into actionable intelligence to improve organizational efficiency, business growth, and customer satisfaction.
Of course, BI tools have been available for years, so why is there increased interest now to adopt them for increased customer relationship management (CRM) benefits? Implementation time is one factor. Previously, such efforts required at least seven to nine months of effort to build a data warehouse from scratch. In addition, business users had to rely on technical staff to manually create BI reports -- a lengthy process. Even then, data collection and metrics often differed across business units, which led to incomplete analyses or extensive reworking prior to producing useful information.
Recently, however, major software vendors -- including Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle -- have begun bundling integrated data warehouses, BI tools and numerous ready-made reporting dashboards with their enterprise applications. As a result, with proper planning, an organization employing enterprise CRM can now begin using BI capabilities quicker than ever before. Furthermore, organizations can easily embed data warehousing information directly into the modern user interfaces of the business applications their employees use every day.
Altogether, these changes have transformed BI from providing weekly or monthly reports, to providing real-time data analyses and actionable intelligence for decision-makers and customer-facing resources. Such information improves employee efficiency by driving them toward tasks that demonstrably improve customer satisfaction and revenue. In addition, BI tools rapidly determine which marketing, sales, and service techniques are most effective for maximizing revenue; enable managers to more efficiently allocate resources; guide future product strategies; and provide senior executives with more accurate revenue predictions.
Even with the new generation of BI tools integrated into enterprise CRM applications, however, deploying them for optimal advantage first requires a BI plan. Based on its extensive experience in helping organizations apply BI capabilities to enhance their CRM results, Innoveer recommends developing a Roadmap that defines desired business outcomes, relevant data and metrics to track, appropriate product functionality to utilize, and required project skills and infrastructure enhancements. With such a plan, organizations can advance beyond simply capturing raw sales, service, and marketing data, to generating the deep insight needed to maximize business impact, while also ensuring a consistent approach to these issues across the entire organization.
Precisely where should organizations begin to ready themselves for BI? Innoveer recommends that organizations consider six best practices when designing a BI Roadmap:
1) Specify Business Outcomes: Start by defining the business case and desired business outcomes for the project.
2) Pursue Metrics: Next, determine which metrics or BI dashboards the organization should measure; what types of information senior executives, and sales, marketing and service managers are demanding; and then consistently analyze all metrics.
3) Standardize Processes: Following that, evaluate sales processes and related terminology across customer-facing business units to ensure consistent definitions.
4) Locate Data: Organizations must then verify that the data needed to track desired metrics is consistent, being collected, and of sufficient quality, and also identify each data entity's location and business owner.
5) Build Infrastructure: Next, identify the correct infrastructure for supporting consistent BI capabilities.
6) Identify Skills: Lastly, gather the necessary BI, CRM and data warehouse skill sets.
By pursuing these six strategies, organizations will create a Roadmap tailored to their specific business needs. They can then implement the plan in small stages, with each phase tied to delivering a specific business outcome -- to improve efficiency, growth and customer satisfaction.
Pursue the Right Opportunities
Many companies turn to BI to determine how to most effectively direct their sales forces. For example, one leading manufacturer that regularly receives a massive list of all local construction projects, wanted to understand which of the thousands of sales opportunities its 25-person sales force should pursue, to have the best chance of closing deals and generating maximum revenue.
To answer that question, this company turned to Innoveer to implement BI tools to predict which sales opportunities will produce maximum revenue, and then automatically e-mail a BI report, which identifies the 10 sales opportunities each person should pursue to its highly mobile sales force. As part of this initiative, Innoveer also defined relevant manufacturing industry metrics, identified the data necessary to track them, and helped implement the required infrastructure improvements. The result: By directing its existing sales team to focus on the most lucrative opportunities, this manufacturer has already increased its revenue by 20%.
Another Innoveer client, a leading financial firm, utilizes desktop-based BI dashboards to provide account managers with color-coded feedback on a number of key performance indicators (KPIs). These dashboards compare each account manager with their peers -- including the number of clients contacted daily, the average time required to close a sales opportunity, projected quarterly sales and customer satisfaction scores. This organization believes that these BI dashboards drive its salespeople to be more competitive with their peers, thus increasing their efficiency.
At the same time, the BI dashboards also simplify account managers' roles. In particular, the BI-driven CRM interface provides just-in-time task suggestions to help close all open sales opportunities, as well as useful supplemental information, such as annual contract renewal alerts or service problems.
Many organizations are turning to BI to create a single view of each customer and ensure high levels of customer satisfaction. For example, a leading online information broker grew rapidly over five years via a number of acquisitions, which resulted in business divisions with disconnected sales processes and silos of customer data. Ultimately, customers grew dissatisfied because multiple salespeople from different divisions would offer inconsistent pricing and dissimilar product bundles, and furthermore, could not definitively confirm which licenses the customer had already purchased.
For assistance, the company turned to Innoveer to help implement an out-of-the-box data warehouse, and consolidate three different reporting tools into one. As a result, the company can now more easily track sales activities across the entire organization, and coordinate sales and marketing efforts for maximum efficiency. These efforts have also enhanced up- and cross-selling activities, increased revenue, minimized customer turnover, and improved customer satisfaction levels.
This summary was drawn from a longer white paper by Innoveer. To read the entire piece, click here.
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