Which customers are truly valuable to my company? How do I optimize my engagement with them?

Companies adopt CRM systems for a variety of reasons – as a shared database of contacts, a way to track the sales process most closely, or as a method of managing customer-related business processes, from leads to opportunities, orders, deliveries and support. Regardless of the approach, as much as companies benefit from the power of CRM to optimize these processes, they suffer from the difficulty in performing analysis of the customer lifecycle. It’s just too hard to report on customer touches throughout the lifecycle – it requires reporting across tables, which is hard in any operational system. And when this information lives in multiple systems, it’s practically impossible.

Understanding the customer lifecycle is an absolutely critical piece for any business – from initial awareness and interest and trial usage through conversion to paying customer, service and support, uprgade and renewal. GoodData helps answer these critical questions:

• What are the key metrics that drive my customer lifecycle?
• How fast do customers convert into paying customers? Has this changed as the company has matured?
• Does greater awareness result in more leads or just more noise?
• Which lead sources convert fastest? Which convert into the largest-paying customers?
• What customers from what lead source cause the most support incidents?
• What customer support behaviors lead to renewals? Cancellations?