New Paths to Customer Insight
Company executives have gathered customer intelligence from multiple sources for ages: demographic data, survey feedback, and the like have long been mainstays for marketers. But today it is becoming increasingly important to not only look at that data holistically, but also to look further for that insight. Blogs, online communities, contact center interactions, and more reveal information on customers' feelings -- good and bad -- about your products, service, customer experience, staff, and brand image. Mining those channels is a start, but are not enough.
Companies need to combine that information with insight into market trends to predict what customers will need or want in a year, or even five years, from now to stay a step ahead of their competition. In "The Evolution of Customer Intelligence: What's the Missing Link?" in today's issue of Return on Customer, we discuss how companies like Peet's Coffee, Samsung, and Nokia are doing this -- and we cite a study that points up the urgency for companies to extend their customer insight strategies.
This topic also came up earlier this week at Oracle's Open World customer conference. During his keynote, Cisco president and CEO John Chambers said that the ability to catch market transitions three to five years before they're obvious is imperative, because if you wait until they're happening you're too late. Chambers predicted what he feels are the next wave of market transitions to watch for. Among them, he cited the growing power of the human network, customer experience (including users defining that experience), collaboration, and the blurring of content/device boundaries.
How do you see customer intelligence evolving?
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