HOW IS BIG DATA AND CRM SHAPING THE MARKET?
This term ‘big data’ refers to massive amounts of data that can be mined with analytics software to generate crucial information such as preferences, needs, and wants of your potential customers and customers alike. This type of information allows you to predict the kind of services to extend to them to produce the most sales. However, you need a CRM to be able to manage your business leads and provide them with care and service that has a personal touch. Here are four major ways the combination of big data and CRM are shaping today’s marketing campaigns.
Enabling Better Pricing
Getting pricing right is one major concern for most businesses. According to Mckinsey, a one percent price increase is equal to an 8.7 percent increase in operating profit. Unlike time-consuming, manual practices, big data makes it virtually possible to see the pricing patterns that can easily unlock value. These prices constantly change, making it overwhelming for large companies to get granular and manage these pricing variables, and at the core of this is big data.
Fairmont Raffles Hotels International is using dynamic pricing to optimize revenue. They incorporate inventory and supplier data among other real-time datasets, financial forecast, and models of consumer likelihood to purchase to be able to employ dynamic pricing. Their hotel chains can offer one standard rate on some days and a different one on other days. Their prices are sometimes at a mark-up or a discount depending on the predicted prices. As the hotel rooms get filled up, the management can increase the price of the rooms, as part of the package deals and standalone rooms.
Better Customer Responsiveness
Big data allows you to have scads of data about your company, and this allows your company to craft outreach in the most productive way. Based on what you know about your neighbors and cyber-neighbors, your marketing campaigns will be completely different.
McCain Foods has transformed the responsiveness of their customers with big data and CRM. This global food giant uses Teradata to get insights into what customers want, how, why, and where they spend their money. Those insights have shaped McCain’s business culture of treating data ‘one way’ into a new culture that seeks more data from customers so as to be able to innovate and create more changes. Executives look at their dashboards frequently and get insights from their customers to improve their marketing strategies.
Improving Decision Making
As has already been demonstrated, big data can help you to attract many customers. Big data is indeed a viable decision-making tool, and as it becomes increasingly used in the real-world business environment, the way businesses make decisions is bound to continue changing. Businesses are able to build their decisions at all levels on top of big data insights, which are being used to determine the best way to identify your audience, how to communicate with them, and what time to communicate with them.
Research has shown that “the best time to send emails to your prospects is 5:00 pm, which has 23.63 percent chance of being opened within the first one hour after delivery. But that might not be so with all your clients. Big data is able to give you a different time to serve the unique needs of your company depending on the behaviour of your leads and customers.” CRM comes in at this point to help you know how to connect with these individuals and how to affect their opinions in the most productive way.
Enhanced Management of Leads and Customers
CRM ensures the benefits of big data do not ultimately become a problem. With increased leads and customers, there is a need for a system that will help you to serve these individuals effectively. Without such a system, they become ex-customers and ex-leads, and all your efforts go to waste. Furthermore, your brand can suffer significantly when these individuals go negative about you to their neighbors, cyber neighbours, and friends.
CRM tools are available for the service of a wide range of professionals. If you are a real estate agent, you can use specialized, cloud-based CRM to manage every step from lead and staying in touch with their clients to scheduling open home, appointments from any devices, and the final settlement. Doctors and dentists are not left out of this. They use CRM for scheduling, posting of up-to-date medical documents for the patient to go through, posting pre-visit and post-visit instructions for the clients and much more.
Johnston Press has rolled out Salesforce CRM cloud software on iPad to be able to manage their leads and customers effectively. This newspaper company is running an eight-year roadmap to transform their business into a digital media firm. By deploying this CRM, the company has significantly reduced the number of their staff members who have to travel to the office daily. The software also enables sales teams to work more directly with potential advertising customers. Johnston uses CRM software on their iPad to capture details of a customer’s advertising campaign and transfer this data to a customer’s service advisor in their office for processing.
The Bottom Line
The integration of big data and CRM allows marketers to pay greater attention to making customer relations more successful. You need to have CRM software that can help you turn most leads and customers into growing sales and intimately increased profits. Big data will allow you to have more leads and customers, but how you manage CRM will determine whether your marketing plan is successful. If you are using big data techniques already, CRM can actually become your revenue driver.