Customer analytics is all about extracting actionable insights from large amounts of customer data. This helps you grow, allowing you to take more targeted action to better serve customers and optimise business processes. But the investment required often means companies put off moving to this new way of working. In this blog, we explore how preparing a business case will give you more certainty about the benefits – financial and otherwise – of your plans.
We are all generating more and more data, and with it comes hidden value that can help your organisation move forward. A customer analytics platform is indispensable for analysing customer data and making predictions about the behaviour of potential and existing customers. Even with a good customer profile alone, you can answer questions such as: How will my customer behave in the future? Which type of customer will respond best to my marketing efforts? When will someone make a repeat purchase? When is the best time to approach this customer? This knowledge helps you get ahead of the competition.
Discover how insight-driven working can benefit your organisation
The insights you gain from customer data lead to more informed decisions going forwards: whether around developing a new product or service, opening a second branch, or on using marketing and sales capacity as efficiently as possible. But as beautiful as solutions driven mainly by artificial intelligence are, when it comes to the bottom line, your investment in technology must obviously deliver value for your organisation. The best way to find out if a potential customer analytics investment will deliver is to prepare a business case.
In particular, a good business case will delve deeper into the why. Particularly with larger, more costly projects, the advantage of this is that internal discussions become easier because you have the right supporting information at your disposal.
What are the components of a good business case?
You are more likely to convince a manager or budget holder of your position if you include the following points in your case:
- The background and rational for starting the project;
- Its alignment with company objectives;
- The other options you’ve considered;
- The expected added value of the project;
- Key risks;
- The investment needed;
- Timing;
- A cost-benefit analysis .
Of course, you cannot know everything. There will always be parts of your business case that depend on assumptions. Nevertheless, a comprehensive forward-looking calculation allows you to better estimate what the outcome will be.
Need help developing your business case?
Want to get an idea of what your business case could look like? Let our consultants work it out, and find out what you could save and what you could gain through actions aimed at customer retention, cross-selling and upselling.
Want to know more about the benefits of customer analytics for your organisation? Contact us.
