Dears,As more and more companies invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives, it is becoming apparent that customer insight is a key component of any CRM strategy. Many companies started their CRM initiatives by implementing call centers or sales force automation tools with the primary goal of increasing the efficiency of their customer-facing operations. These same companies are now looking to segment their customers by needs and value so they can define acquisition, retention and cross-selling opportunities. Other companies began their CRM initiatives by researching customer behavior, needs and wants, and are now trying to drive strategies through various channels in the most efficient way.
Regardless of where a company began in its CRM efforts, the following capabilities are critical for achieving successful deployment of any customer strategy:
• Customer Insight: Ongoing research into the traits and behavior that create customer segments, ensure stability and track customer migrations.
• Strategic Insight: Continual executive monitoring of ROI to ensure the key metrics are trending in the right direction and the strategy is performing successfully.
• Organizational Insight: Managers monitoring of CRM process details to ensure that the train is on the right track, the organization is adopting and continues to adopt new processes and technologies, and that all of the blocking and tackling needed to support the strategy is working well.
• Experience Insight: Monitoring different customer interactions or behavior to react to changes in the environment as quickly as possible.
• Decision Insight: The review and ongoing updating of a best practices knowledge base and lessons learned, enabling companies to make well-informed decisions and better react to internal process issues, changes in customer behavior or any other key metrics that are not trending in the right direction.
Collectively, these capabilities are defined as Customer Intelligence (CI), the core analytical requirements for an optimized CRM strategy. Successful implementation of Customer Intelligence solutions directly leads to better customer understanding, increased competitive advantage based on this deeper understanding, enhanced customer profitability and improved customer experiences.To begin a Customer Intelligence strategy, companies should first use a Customer Intelligence (CI) Roadmap for their organization that identifies how they are approaching implementing core CI capabilities. By becoming familiar with the common stages in a Customer Intelligence program, organizations can improve their existing CI capabilities, identify where new opportunities exist, and enact a strategy for implementing these solutions.
THE FOUR STAGES OF THE CI ROADMAP
There are 4 critical stages of the CI Roadmap, Brief note about these stages given for your reference.
• CI Infrastructure: Integration of information from across the enterprise into a 360-degree view of the customer for analytical purposes.
• Business Performance Management: Use of dashboards and scorecards to assess corporate and operational performance. • Decision Enablement: The ability to be proactively alerted to issues, track decisions and leverage past decision performance to influence current and future decision making.
• Business Activity Monitoring: Real-time alerts to current issues and automation of the decision making process to remedy problems.
Though not required to be implemented in order, the CI Roadmap increases in the effectiveness of the visual interface to the different types of insight (customer, strategic, organizational, decision), as well as the automation of the decision process itself. Companies often find themselves at different stages of the CI Roadmap, since many organizations have interpreted and built out their CRM initiative in a variety of ways. In the end, organizations need to apply all of the concepts of the Roadmap to support a comprehensive CI initiative, but each organization may implement these in a different order based on their priorities, needs and current situations.
Customer Intelligence plays an important role in helping companies gain the full value from their CRM initiatives. It identifies cost and revenue opportunities, provides a vehicle for a closed-loop, continuous improvement environment and continues to monitor the initiatives and detailed processes that make up a CRM program. No matter where companies find themselves on the CI Roadmap, implementing elements of all four tiers is a critical piece of a comprehensive Customer Intelligence strategy.
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