RESEARCH & RESOURCES

TDWI Checklist Report | Best Practices for Delivering Actionable Customer Intelligence

October 9, 2015

In every industry today, businesses feel a fierce urgency to become customer-centric. They want to know what they can do to preserve and expand existing customer relationships and attract the best new customers. They are looking to business intelligence (BI), analytics, and supporting big data, data warehousing, and customer data management platforms to help them drive smarter decisions and actions in marketing, sales, service, e-commerce, and other customer-facing activities. With new analytic insights, companies seek to more easily identify how to streamline and improve their operations and innovate in the development of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) products and services.

This interest is surging at a time when customer data sources are expanding, challenging organizations to ingest and analyze this tsunami of data and distill it into actionable insights. Adding to the challenge is that customer engagements are occurring across diverse channels. Data generated by customers is both structured and unstructured; joining traditional sources such as sales transaction records are new, less-structured sources such as social media activity. Gaining an integrated view that uncovers hidden data relationships between these sources can be invaluable to improving customer intelligence. The hard part, however, is filtering the data “noise” to sharpen focus on the most relevant information for marketing campaign decisions, sales strategies, call center performance management, online engagement, and more.

The data is valuable, but it is of little actionable benefit if users cannot interact with it effectively to share insights in presentations, e-mail, texts, and meetings. New tools that combine the powers of data visualization with easier-to-use analytics are maturing, making it possible for nontechnical business users to do more on their own with less reliance on IT developers and data science experts—valuable as they continue to be.

This Checklist offers seven best practices for formulating a strategy to derive and deliver actionable customer intelligence. The practices are aimed at helping organizations turn their increasingly voluminous data riches into competitive business advantage.


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