Do you need a Customer Intelligence unit!
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Fri, May 21, 2010
Some years ago, I was the head of marketing at HDFC bank and we had embarked upon a data led marketing strategy. At the heart of this strategy was the ability to extract knowledge about customers and convert that knowledge into business impact.
So we built from scratch ,a team of analysts who pored over tonnes of data to come up with actionable cross sell models, amongst other stuff! The question was what do you call this team! The intuitive answer that we had, was to call the team the Customer Intelligence unit! This was possibly the first real CIU to be created amongst Indian marketers!
So what is Customer Intelligence(CI)? Dave Frankland of Forrester, defined CI as, "The management and analysis of customer data from all sources, used to drive marketing performance and business strategy. Referring to a report published last year, for which Forrester surveyed 300 CI professionals, Frankland said the analysis firm had concluded: "not everyone understands the value of [CI]."
Forrester segmented the responders into three different levels of intelligence leveraging:
Functional: 54 percent of the professionals surveyed use customer data at a very functional level but don't have the budget, people, and respect to be more strategic and more valuable in their respective organizations
Marketing: 34 percent were middle-of-the-pack — they were only starting to use CI cross-channel to drive more functions
Strategic: Only 12 percent measured the value of CI and used it as a strategic weapon.
Those who did measure CI value told Forrester that CI drives business results. Almost two-thirds said it improved their customer lifetime value. More than three fourths said it improved customer satisfaction.
Have a look at this interesting article from Forrester:
Creating Customer Intelligence capability
Happy reading!