5 ways predictive analytics can enhance your CRM system

In the article “5 ways predictive analytics can boost your CRM systems,” featured in Professional Carwashing & Detailing’s May issue, contributor Lang Smith discusses how predictive analytics can impact a car care business’ customer relationship management (CRM) system.

“For a sales-driven organization, it isn’t the size of your data that matters, it’s what you do with it,” asserts Smith in the article. “No longer a discretionary luxury, predictive analytics are now the name of the game for those who seek to utilize customer metrics in a meaningful way and establish a tremendous competitive advantage, gain notable market share and significantly boost bottom lines.”

Smith continues in the article, “Just what exactly is predictive analytics? Simply put, it’s the ability to more precisely predict customers’ future spending based on their past behaviors. Of course, there’s no way to actually predict the future, but predictive analytics can give companies invaluable insight that can make or break a CRM system.”

In the article, Smith discusses five ways predictive analytics can help enhance your CRM system, which include the following:

Calculating customer behavior
Boosting communication efforts
Capitalizing on marketing strategies
Categorizing customer spending
Maintaining repeat customers

“The greatest barrier a sales-driven organization can face when deciding to implement predictive analytics is a lack of quality. Getting the most out of a predictive analytics platform requires actual data on customers’ spending habits, the attributes of products or services they are buying (other than the ‘people who buy this also by this’ type of model), date ranges of their spending and how much they spend on average; some demographic information wouldn’t hurt either,” writes Smith in the article. “If it’s really good, the predictive analytics platform will automatically track all your customers’ actions from start to finish.”

Check out the infographic below, created by the PC&D team, for more information on how predictive analytics can keep your CRM system from falling short.