CRM Analytics: key tools and how to leverage them in 2024

CRM (Customer Relations Management) analytics tools have become indispensable for businesses, allowing you to piece together the insights you’ve gathered to build your customer relationships. These powerful tools – such as those offered by CRM giants Zendesk, Salesforce, and HubSpot – can help a business proactively anticipate a customer’s needs, rather than forcing you to wait for feedback to make key decisions.

What are CRM analytics?

CRM analytics refers to the programming that crunches your customer data into analysable insights so you can make informed business decisions. Analytics tools have become a key aspect of CRM software as customers increasingly demand quicker, personalised services from businesses. By examining customer behaviour, sales trends, and marketing effectiveness, a business can collate evidence-based data to make the decisions to meet those demands.

CRM analytics are often natively built into CRM software and can produce customer behaviour reports, sales forecasts, or ROI (Return on Investment) analysis of marketing campaigns.

There are three main types of CRM analytics: collaborative, operational, and analytical.

• Collaborative CRM: focused on customer behaviour, this establishes a centralised customer database accessible to every department, fostering visibility into customer communications, purchase history, and service requests.
• Operational CRM: focused on sales trends, this automates processes by providing a comprehensive overview of customer interactions, aiding in tasks such as sales forecasting and prospect identification.
• Analytical CRM: focused on marketing effectiveness, this operates discreetly in the background, analysing the sales data collected by operational CRM applications. It also tracks various performance metrics to provide actionable insights into customer behaviour. This type of CRM analytics empowers organisations to make informed campaign decisions, optimise marketing strategies, and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Benefits of CRM analytics

You don’t need to be an Excel enthusiast or a data analyst to appreciate the huge benefits that integrating CRM analytics can afford your customer relations. Here are the main ones to keep in mind:

• Enhanced productivity: one of the standout benefits of CRM analytics is its seamless integration with other tools, consolidating various tasks into a single interface. This  simplifies workflows and boosts productivity by enabling you to perform multiple functions effortlessly. CRM analytics also help you get rid of mundane tasks by automating them, giving you more time to do things that really matter. For instance, rather than having to sit in front of an Excel sheet doing calculations and crunching numbers, you can spend time analysing exactly why our churn rate is so high.
• Tailored personalisation: understanding your customers is pivotal for success, and CRM analytics excels in this arena. By meticulously recording and tracking customer analytics, businesses gain comprehensive insights into individual preferences and behaviours. This wealth of information empowers organisations to tailor their approaches, ensuring personalised interactions that resonate with each client. The result is a more engaging and satisfying customer experience, ultimately fostering loyalty and customer advocacy. For instance, CRM will tell you what that new prospective client prefers and how to best reach out to them, whether that’s by phone or email.
• Amplifying sales opportunities: CRM analytics can help boost sales. By analysing sales trends and identifying opportunities, your business can fine-tune its strategies for maximum impact. Sales teams can create targeted strategies that resonate with their target audience, such as Gen Z customers or Boomers. This can lead to increased conversion rates and revenue growth.
• Data-driven marketing success: CRM analytics can delve into comprehensive data sets, allowing businesses to understand what marketing campaigns work and what doesn’t. This can help tailor marketing strategies as they will be based on data-driven insights.

Exploring Zendesk Sell

💪 Best for: easy-to-navigate interface
🔑 Key features: lead generation, prospecting tools, sales forecasting, performance metric, pipeline management

On the analytics front, Zendesk offers businesses Zendesk Sell as a package of streamlining products designed to boost efficiency and growth. The CRM dashboard, contact database, and sales automations integrate seamlessly, providing a unified platform for customer relationship management.

A standout feature of Zendesk Sells is its user-friendly interface, complete with pre-built charts and dashboards based on industry best practices. This simplifies data interpretation and decision-making. Small businesses can easily customise the reports to align with their unique needs and share crucial insights internally within the platform.

The diverse range of features includes lead generation, prospecting tools, sales forecasting, performance metrics, and pipeline management. This empowers small businesses to optimise their sales processes, make informed decisions, and foster sustainable growth through a data-driven approach.

Salesforce analytics in action

💪 Best for: understanding data-driven insights
🔑 Key features: chatbot, predictive analysis, sales forecasting, automated contacts, and calendar and email syncing

Reigning in the power of AI, Salesforce’s Einstein CRM analytics tool can help foster empathetic and highly personalised customer relationships. Salesforce analytics simplifies data management by automatically syncing information into the Salesforce CRM, creating a centralised hub for all customer interactions. The tool goes beyond basic analytics, providing actionable recommendations with clear explanations, enabling you to comprehend the data-driven insights.

For marketing analytics, Salesforce proves invaluable when measuring your ROI . The platform’s customer journey analytics maps the entire customer experience, providing a clear understanding of user interactions.

HubSpot analytics unveiled

💪 Best for: marketing teams
🔑 Key features: interaction tracking, email management, pipeline management, activity dashboard

HubSpot Analytics is a powerful small business tool that is structured around five hubs that cater to marketing, sales, service, content management, and operations. Each hub meticulously collects and analyses data from its dedicated processes, providing a full view of the entire customer journey.

HubSpot Analytics uses AI-powered technology to capture details from customer calls, enabling the analysis of representative performance and offering valuable coaching opportunities. This feature contributes to improved customer interactions and boosts retention.

The Operations Hub within HubSpot Analytics is a key component, generating data reports that are tailored for marketing and sales. Its robust features, including interaction tracking, email management, pipeline management, and an activity dashboard, empower small businesses to enhance processes, monitor performance metrics, and make informed decisions.

Conclusion

CRM analytics tools – such as those offered by Zendesk, Salesforce, and HubSpot – can help you translate numbers on a spreadsheet into actionable data-driven insights. With the right suite for your particular customer service and experience needs, you can make informed business decisions, keep customers happy, and scale your growth.