Analytics has become one of the hot CRM application in recent years, holding out the promise of dissecting, and even predicting, customer behavior. However, the reality is that the technology has yet to meet its promise. The reason, many analyst say, is after-the-fact focus of most commercial analytics applications.

Analytics still is not embedded into real-time decision support processes, according to Rod Johnson, vice president and general manager of AMR Research customer management strategies.

"The ideal is to help the user while ... actually performing a particular task to make a decision then and there," he told CRMDaily.com.

Past is Prologue

The IDC report, titled "In the Nick of Real Time: CRM Analytics and the Decision Process," emphasizes the importance of real-time tech capabilities and advises companies to reevaluate key areas in the analysis and decision cycle -– tracking, analyzing, segmentation and modeling -- and the policy hub.

"Successful CRM companies should concentrate not only on minimizing clock time, but also on the more elastic, perceived delays that lower the chance of successful CRM analytics usage," said Bob Blumstein, director of research for IDC's CRM analytics and marketing applications research.

IDC defines a CRM analytics application as a software product that demonstrates business process support and uses time-oriented, integrated data from multiple sources.

The requirement of time-orientation exposes a major stumbling block for real-time analytics because true analytic programs require the integration of historical information, IDC said.

A Fine Art

Despite its limitations and often skyrocketing costs, the analytics process has spread far beyond direct marketing interaction, where it first took hold, Aberdeen vice president Denis Pombriant told CRMDaily.

"Sales forecasting has become a fine art. Users can analyze raw pipeline data or develop internal metrics to rate how long it takes to close a deal, for example," he said.

Day Job

Bo Manning, CEO of Pivotal, said that analytics is on a trajectory to provide real-time processing.

"Now that a lot of companies have gotten their arms around automating operational data, there is an increasing focus to develop more sophisticated analytics," Manning told CRMDaily. "A few years ago, when someone talked about analytics, it was in the guise of building data marts or data warehouses and then forecasting using historical information."

Now he said, companies are talking about using analytics on a day-to-day basis.