Oct 1, 2009
Customer Analytics
Customer analytics is a process by which data from customer behavior is aggregated and analysed to gain customer insight, enabling your business to help make better and quicker business decisions. This information is used by businesses for direct marketing and customer relationship management. Customer analytics plays a very important role in predicting customer behaviour and shaping future customer interactionsCustomer analytics can provide customer segmentation groupings (for example, at its simplest, dividing customers into those most and least likely to repurchase a product); profitability analysis (which customers lead to the most profit over time); personalization (the ability to market to individual customers based on the data collected about them); event monitoring (for example, when a customer reaches a certain dollar volume of purchases); what-if scenarios (how likely is a customer or customer category that bought one product to buy a similar one); and predictive modeling (for example, comparing various product development plans in terms of likely future success given the customer knowledge base). Data collection and analysis are viewed as a continuing and iterative process and ideally over time business decisions are refined based on feedback from earlier analysis and consequent decisions.
In some form or another, customer analytics is present in every company. The efforts of product development, marketing, client services and other departments are fuelled by customer actions, or at least assumptions about the customer. You wouldn't launch a product unless you thought there was a need for it.
Benefits of Customer analytics are said to lead not only to better and more productive customer relations in terms of sales and service but also to improvement in supply chain management (lower inventory and speedier delivery) and thus lower costs and more competitive pricing.