Get Started with Loyalty Analytics
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the value of analytics for a loyalty business.
- Describe the different CRM Analytics components.
- List the Loyalty Management dashboards and apps, and the roles that use them.
Analyze Data for Better Business
Let’s turn the clock back: more like 2 million years back when early humans lived in caves and used stones and bones as tools. To forecast how long food supplies would last, they made incisions or cuts into the bones to keep track of trading activities. Known as tally sticks, these bones are the earliest known examples of humans storing and analyzing data.
What early humans essentially did was use “small data” to determine something big: their future. Now, humans have taken these fundamentals to a much larger scale because data is abundant and complex. We now require more sophisticated tools to interpret, predict, and analyze data. Let’s understand how data is analyzed and used to make business decisions.
Linda Walsh is the loyalty program manager at Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), a retailer that sells outdoor and recreational gear and apparel. Using Salesforce’s Loyalty Management, she oversees the day-to-day running of the loyalty program, NTO Insider. The program is doing well, but member engagement is in decline.
Linda thinks the program will benefit from analytics to drive positive outcomes. The CRM Analytics for Loyalty Management application is built on a loyalty data model that offers actionable insights and intelligence on the loyalty program. It’ll help Linda anticipate customer needs, mitigate risk and fraud, personalize rewards, and optimize customer experiences. The app will enable the NTO loyalty team to answer the following key business questions.
- How can we be sure that our business decisions make financial sense when so much of the value and costs are based on unpredictable future events?
- How certain are we of the liability estimates when that estimate is mostly based on events that may not happen for years?
- What can we do to optimize the economic value of the program?
- What plans do we have in place to improve member experience and retention?
With the help of a Salesforce admin at NTO, the team deploys CRM Analytics for Loyalty Management. In this module, you follow Linda and her team to learn how they use analytics for all things loyalty. Before that, let’s learn more about CRM Analytics. Find out its components and the dashboards that key team members use.
To learn how to create and deploy Analytics for Loyalty, check out the CRM Analytics for Loyalty Administrators Trailhead module.
Use CRM Analytics to Transform Data
CRM Analytics enables businesses to make sense of large amounts of data. It gathers disparate data and organizes it in a way that offers insights into past, present, and future business operations. It helps businesses understand their performance and improve business processes. Through AI-powered predictions and prescriptive recommendations, they learn better about customers and customer preferences.
CRM Analytics also addresses complex reporting needs. It organizes data in a visual format that helps businesses answer critical questions at a glance. Complex data is transformed into dashboards so you get information about the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to the business.
Data, dashboards, KPIs, there’s a lot that makes up CRM Analytics. Let’s explore each component in detail.
Explore Dashboards for Every Role
In the real world, the loyalty team might comprise many different roles. This module focuses on the loyalty program manager and the member services team. Let’s find out what they do and the dashboards they use.
| Role | Responsibilities | Dashboards They Use |
|---|---|---|
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Linda Walsh, Loyalty Program Manager |
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Issac Nunez, Member Services Manager |
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Shelli Sheldon, Member Service Agent |
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Predict the Foreseeable Future
The loyalty team also uses Loyalty Einstein Discovery apps that help them make predictions and recommendations for smarter decision-making. Loyalty program managers use the following Einstein Discovery apps to predict promotion-influenced revenue, determine the likelihood of member inactivity, and manage program liability.
- Predictions for Promotion Revenue App
- Predictions for Member Engagement App
You’ll go over each of these dashboards and predictive apps in detail. In the next unit, find out how program managers like Linda use dashboards to make important loyalty and business decisions.