What it is

Customer intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering and analyzing information regarding customers; their details and their activities, in order to build deeper and more effective customer relationships

Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...

 and improve strategic decision making .

CI and CRM

Customer Intelligence is a key component of effective customer relationship management

Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...

 (CRM), and when effectively implemented it is a rich source of insight into the behaviour and experience of a company's customer base.

As an example, some customers walk into a store and walk out without buying anything. Information about these customers/prospects (or their visits), may not exist in a traditional CRM system, as no sales are entered on the store cash register. Although no commercial transaction took place, knowing why customers leave the store (perhaps by asking them, or the storeperson, to complete a survey) and using this data to make inferences about customer behaviour, is an example of CI.

Process

Customer Intelligence begins with reference data

Reference data

Reference data are data describing a physical or virtual object and its properties. Reference data are usually described with nouns.Reference data is used in data management to define characteristics of an identifier that are used within other data centric processes...

 – basic key facts about the customer, such as their geographic location.

This data is then supplemented with transactional data – reports of customer activity. This can be commercial information (for example purchase history from sales and order processing), interactions from service contacts over the phone and via e-mail.

A further subjective dimension can be added, in the form of customer satisfaction surveys or agent data.

Finally, a company can use competitor insight and mystery shopping

Mystery shopping

Mystery shopping or a mystery consumer is a tool used externally by market research companies or watchdog organizations or internally by companies themselves to measure quality of service or compliance to regulation, or to gather specific information about products and services...

 to get a better view of how their service benchmarks in the market.

By mining this data, and placing it in context with wider information about competitors, conditions in the industry, and general trends, information can be obtained about customers' existing and future needs, how they reach decisions, and predictions made about their future behavior.

Example sources of data for CI

Speech analytics

Speech Analytics

Speech analytics is a term used to describe automatic methods of analyzing speech to extract useful information about the speech content. Although it often includes elements of automatic speech recognition, where the identities of spoken words or phrases are determined, it may also include analysis...

 – used to monitor telephone conversations taking place between companies and customers, using phonetic analysis or speech to text

Speech recognition

Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...

 to find keywords and phrases, classify call types and identify trends.

Click Tracking – used to monitor the popularity and usage of corporate web sites, this data can provide clues to product interest and buying intention. For example, a company may infer a customer is interested in purchasing a particular service if they are spending time browsing specific product pages.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...

 – software solutions used for Salesforce automation and to manage customer relationships which can store data on the quantity, type and category of customer and prospect contacts.

Frontline data capture which may (or may not) form part of a CRM software solution, but which is used by front line agents to record more subjective data regarding customer contacts, such as the root cause

Root cause

A root cause is rarely an initiating cause of a causal chain which leads to an outcome or effect of interest. Commonly, root cause is misused to describe the depth in the causal chain where an intervention could reasonably be implemented to change performance and prevent an undesirable outcome.In...

 of the customer picking up the phone (e.g. they received their bill) or their emotional state.

Customer satisfaction and market research surveys, often mined via text analytics

Text analytics

The term text analytics describes a set of linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques that model and structure the information content of textual sources for business intelligence, exploratory data analysis, research, or investigation. The term is roughly synonymous with text mining;...

, which can additionally be applied, for customer intelligence purposes, to contact center notes, e-mail, and other textual sources.

Benefits

Customer Intelligence provides a detailed understanding of the experience customers have in interacting with a company, and allows predictions to be made regarding reasons behind customer behaviors.

This knowledge can then be applied to support more effective and strategic decision making – for example, understanding why customers call makes it easier to predict (and plan to reduce) call volumes in a contact centre

Contact centre (business)

A contact centre is a facility used by companies to manage all client contact through a variety of mediums such as telephone, fax, letter, e-mail and increasingly, online live chat....

.