Market research company Aberdeen Group recently found that 60% of the top-performing companies would increase their budgets for customer analytics next year in able to better determine the most important trends, patterns and behaviour of customers. An integrated view on the customer is key in providing relevant interactions and content and, thus, to increase customer loyalty and marketing efficiency.

A more recent study by Aberdeen Group shows that these reasons also rank among those that drive businesses to invest in predictive technologies.

The most important reason businesses embrace predictive analytics, however, is the increasing competition.But predictive technologies should also result in avoiding dropping sales revenue and waning customer loyalty more rapidly, two other major reasons to use them, Aberdeen found.

Through these predictive technologies companies further also want to focus on creating better marketing campaigns, as well as on the optimization of cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

A dedicated analytics team

Businesses that are already working intensively with such solutions (the “best-in-class”) are much more inclined to compose a dedicated team that analyses and works the market than other respondents. This probably has to do with the more mature ways the best-in-class work with customer data and the amount of data they have. Given the inherent advantages of customer and predictive analytics on sales and marketing efficiency, the ROI of such a team is obvious.

The importance of a uniform and cross-channel view on the customer, and therefore of integrated customer analytics, was already discussed on this blog.

Obviously an important predictive dimension can be added to the existing real-time and historical dimension of customer analytics with predictive technologies. This clearly has its benefits in a marketing strategy that revolves entirely around the customer. The same applies for a cross-channel and integrated CRM-strategy.

You can read more about the survey here or download it here.