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THE NEW RULES OF CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE 1 TREAT CUSTOMERS LIKE PEOPLE 2 ENGAGE WITH CUSTOMERS OVER TIME Our customers are our most precious commodity. Every interaction we have with them is an opportunity to create a lifelong advocate for our brands—or to push them away forever. So why do so many companies continue to treat customers like interchangeable, disposable data points? More than anything, customers want to feel they matter. Empowered by social media, they are eager to share their feedback—but only if they believe we are really listening. We have reached a tipping point in which customers will no longer answer surveys unless they are personally relevant and offer genuine value in return. In our fastmoving, hyper-connected world, time has become the new global currency. If customers agree to spend five minutes of their time answering one of your surveys, they need to understand what’s in it for them. So how do you know if you’ve succeeded? Just look at the response rates to your surveys—and the average time your customers take to respond. One way to demonstrate to your customers that they matter is to build an ongoing, continuous, two-way dialogue with them instead of spamming them with disconnected, one-way interrogations. When you leverage all of the information a customer has shared with you over time instead of asking them a litany of profiling questions again and again, you limit what you need to ask to a handful of the most relevant, impactful questions. What you learn through each successive interaction builds over time, producing a much richer, more human portrait of your customers. They appreciate that you are respecting their time and repay you with better quality insight. Besides, this is how humans interact. We don’t ask what we already know. Instead, day by day and minute by minute, we observe our surroundings, absorb new information and adapt. The more you mirror human interactions in the way you approach your customers, the more meaningful those interactions will become—both for them and for you. visioncritical.com 8 of 12
THE NEW RULES OF CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE 3 DRAW ON INSIGHT WITHIN YOUR COMPANY 4 BREAK DOWN INTERNAL SILOS Our customers aren’t the only ones empowered by technology. Today, buried somewhere within our companies is the data we need to build a comprehensive profile of our customers and prospects. But our ability to analyze data has not kept pace with the volume we collect in our CRM systems from every transaction, credit card swipe, social media post and geo-location device. In 2012, IDC found that only a half of one percent of potentially useful big data ever gets analyzed. Our challenge is no longer about data collection—it’s about weaving that data into a story we can share across the enterprise to enable smarter, more customer-centric decision-making. Customer intelligence is more valuable when it’s ongoing and cross-departmental, not contained within a single discrete project. The solution is simple: don’t waste time spamming your customers to collect redundant variables. Focus on what’s already known about customers and build on that understanding. Customer intelligence needs to deliver value across the enterprise. But the gate-keepers of all that valuable customer data have become increasingly protective of it. They are unwilling to share it because they know it will be used to spam and scare away their customers. Ironically, when companies provide the right opportunity for customers to engage with them and share their feedback and insight, customer retention, satisfaction and share-of-wallet actually increase. Once a company abandons the spam survey and engages in the new rules of customer intelligence gathering, customers are eager to participate because they feel their opinions matter and their voices will be heard. By integrating customer intelligence into the very heart of the business, companies are able to develop new products, new marketing messages and new initiatives that resonate strongly with customers and deliver ROI to the enterprise as well as to the customers themselves. visioncritical.com 9 of 12
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