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!
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Dec 13, 2009
If you were to quantify the time spent by CMO’s , you would find that Communication issues still top the list.
CMOs have always intensely thought about their brands and the emotional connection that they create with their customers. But more needs to be done about actually building value for the customer at each interaction and that means the CMO necessarily has to be the customer advocate within the corporation. Most times this is not a popular role to be playing and often it is not the easiest or the best way to actually “build a career”.
Dave Frankland , a principal analyst at Forrester makes this interesting point about those few companies which have been able to use Customer intelligence as a strategic differentiator. Dave asks about “What defines these leading firms?
They treat customer data as a strategic asset, put the customer at the center of all decision making and use data-driven insight to tailor all customer communications. It sounds simple, but can you name five companies that do it?
Dave’s research shows that fewer than 15% of firms have a strategic customer-intelligence operation. These firms leverage customer intelligence broadly throughout the organization, they value customer knowledge as a corporate asset and they frequently have an evangelist in the C-suite. They continually demonstrate that customer intelligence drives overall business growth.
Key questions that come to my mind are:
1. It is no point doing analytics on customer data if you do not have the right organization structure that converts that “insight into action”.You need a passionate analytics evangelist who forces the pace on decision making based on "insight".
2. How many Marketers do you know who would risk putting their career at risk by being customer advocates internally?