Thursday, April 12, 2012
CRM is widely acknowledged as a critical tool for improving and guiding a business's interactions with its clients, and for targeting new potential customers. Companies, seeing the value of CRM and other, similar tools, are investing heavily in business intelligence, a market that, according to Gartner, is growing at a rate of 9 percent annually.
However, as Tibco recently highlighted, one benefit to CRM is often overlooked: determining whether a particular customer is worth retaining.
While it may seem counterintuitive, a business does not always benefit from gaining a customer. Sometimes, the costs associated with either acquiring or maintaining a client outweigh the benefits of his or her patronage. However, it can be difficult to accurately gauge which customers will ultimately prove to be drains on a business.
As Tibco points out, CRM analytics can provide valuable insight in this area. With a variety of metrics and data analysis functions, CRM analytics can produce a fairly accurate impression of how much revenue a company can expect to see from a given client. This can then be compared to the costs associated with obtaining or maintaining the customer - time spent on the phone by contact center agents, postage for mailings and so on - to determine if the client is worth the investment.
