Siloed data is becoming a thing of the past (That’s so 2010!). Organizations now analyze customer data from first impression to prospect to customer to long term relationship, in one set of reports.
In creating informed dashboards, organizations are often integrating web analytics with sales/support applications such as Oracle, Microsoft, Eloqua, Marketo, and RightNow. One of the most common integrations that we perform is integrating a web analytics platform with a CRM such as SalesForce for marketing, sales, and support data. The most common integrations are below:
- Form Data: This integration involves posting web form data to the CRM (and any other systems)
- Web Analytics Tracking on Marketing Sites: Ensuring that any customer/prospect activity on sites hosted within the CRM are tracked across the entire digital channel.
- Synching Prospect/Customer Visitation History to the Digital Channel with the CRM: This complex task involves identifying important visitor data that can improve marketing, sales, and support efforts and sharing the data with the CRM. For instance, if a prospect is viewing specific products repeatedly this is data the sales team can use to better serve prospects.
All of these points of integration are useful. The 3rd point of integration requires significantly more planning and participation than the first two. The sales and web analyst teams need to work together to determine what types of data promote better service, better timing, and help build customer/prospect confidence. Web analytics data integrated with CRM data can help organizations better serve prospects/customers by reporting data that helps answer the following questions:
- What information do I know about the prospect before their first contact with marketing and sales?
- How interested is a prospect in a product or service? How loyal is the customer?
- How many stakeholders at the prospect/customer organization are reviewing our products and services?
- Is the customer interacting with the organization through multiple channels (i.e. social, email, web, mobile)?
- How does the customer prefer to interact with the marketing, sales, and support teams?
- How does the prospect describe their product/support needs? What is their vocabulary?
- What product elements are most critical to a prospect/customer?
- Where the prospect/customer is in the sales, onboarding, or growth cycle?
- What problems or support needs does a prospect/customer have that needs to be solved?
This level of integration gives teams context for interactions making each contact with prospects and customers more meaningful. Furthermore, the lifecycle data on customer behaviors from source to lead to customer to account growth enables the entire organization to better understand how to serve all customers.
Photo Credit: Mongoose Metrics