Customer Relationship Analysis

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Customer Relationship Analysis Mean?

Customer relationship analysis (CRA) is a term for systems that help to analyze data about customers so that businesses can plan better or make better decisions. CRA tools can order data and provide accessible results using data mining to assist human decision makers in selling, customer outreach, and other business processes.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Customer Relationship Analysis

At its core, CRA is very similar to customer relationship management (CRM). The main difference between the use of these two terms seems to be that while CRA pertains more to the analysis of stored data, CRM most often applies to systems that make existing data visible during interactions with customers, or to systems that generally present a picture of an individual customer, not necessarily for data mining, but for general reference. For example, a simple visual sheet with customer contact info would usually fall under CRM, while a software product that analyzes hundreds of customers and sorts them into actionable categories would fall under CRA.

CRA can provide results such as profitability analysis, which can project who is likely to make purchases in a given scenario. It can also make other projections to help give a business a clearer picture of its prospects with a customer base. As with CRM, CRA can also help a business to generally “know,” and therefore serve, its customers better. One of the main challenges of CRA reported by experts is the task of fitting these tools into an existing IT structure.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.