Analytical Methods - SAP CRM

Lesson Overview

This lesson describes the available analytical methods.

Lesson Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Describe the analytical methods available in SAP CRM.

Business Example

Methods - Measuring

With SAP BI's comprehensive evaluation and navigation options, you can measure the influence of your customer relations on the success of your business, as well as the efficiency of individual actions.

Here you can see a simple example of a report. It has the following characteristics:

• Clear and understandable layout
• Multifunctional selection and drill down functions
• Exception reports and conditions
• Highly customizable Take advantage of the flexible reporting options on the Internet or in Microsoft Excel.

Analytic methods help to ascertain key figures, such as customer profitability, ABC classes, customer lifetime value, and scoring procedures.

To summarize: SAP CRM Analytics ensures that the values measured are used closely with the implementation of the business strategy, for instance by creating a Balanced Scorecard.

Methods - Forecasting

It is important to recognize behavioral patterns and to use them to forecast future behavior.

You can use the following to determine behavioral patterns:

• Clustering, to find out more about a customer segment
• Association analysis, to find out more about cross-selling behavior
• Decision trees, to understand which profiles affect which behavior, and to incorporate this information into forecasts
• Scoring, to bring together different aspects for an overall evaluation
• Linear and multi-linear regression, to collect data for predicting behavioral trends You can also
• Forecast the future value of your customers using CLTV analysis
• Forecast the rate of response to simulate the success of your campaign

Methods - Planning

An important prerequisite in customer relationship management is the possibility to implement a combined marketing, sales, and service planning solution, to acquire and develop a relationship with the right customers, whilst at the same time increasing the profitability of existing customers. Planning and forecasting provides a comprehensive range of tools for all stages of planning for a wide variety of business processes across your company. You can use these tools to develop a planning model that integrates both global strategic and operative planning in a self-contained process for online and offline scenarios.

Planning and forecasting gives your company advantages by:

• Formulating transparent strategies
• Communicating strategies throughout your company
• Coordinating business strategies with your employees' goals
• Linking targets into the annual budget
• Identifying and coordinating strategic initiatives
• Executing gap analyses and scenario planning
• Carrying out regular performance checks and using the feedback to alter strategy accordingly

Methods - Optimizing

SAP CRM Analytics doesn't only measure results. These results can also be used to optimize business processes. The goal of CRM Analytics is only achieved when employees have access to the information they need to make the best possible decisions in their day-to-day work. For example, a call center agent can display all the important customer data on the screen, and the system uses this data to make suggestions (in the form of a “script”) on how best to support the customer. When creating target groups, a campaign manager has easy access to analysis results, such as probability of response and customer categories, and can use these to optimize a campaign.

Use analysis results in your business processes and give your employees the opportunity to make informed decisions.