Customers determine market trends; thus, companies must know all the information about their clients to boost profitability.
Sources for customer data include external and internal ways of acquiring data. Service providers are external sources of customer intelligence. Such information as lookups for telephone number and address, social media, competitors’ websites, household hierarchies, Fair-Isaacs credit scores, customer reviews, and clickstream can be obtained this way.
The company’s internal sources deal with demographic, behavioral, purchase history data, billing records, company’s weblogs, CRM system, customer surveys, etc.
Big data tools as web intelligence, Internet Protocol searches, cookies, server logs, browsing habits are the most popular nowadays (Dam et al., 2019).Customer Intelligence tools in the digital era include CRM systems, social media monitoring, social listening platforms above all.
Converting data into intelligence is crucial, for raw data is useless without analysis. Analytics and marketing teams integrate data from various sources and analyze it with the help of statistical tools. It is recommended to combine the customer intelligence tactics and techniques, as more than one way of implementing research exists to acquire valid data (Kelly et al., 2017).
Customer insights are results of the intelligence process that help to incorporate changes into daily operations. Thus, marketing strategy is improved continually for the sake of a competitive edge.
Customer intelligence facilitates focusing on customers and providing product offerings relevant to a particular client. Once the preferences and motives are established through sentiment analysis in social media, clients are rewarded with special offers in their preferred channels. Customer satisfaction is growing, and the profit is growing, respectively.
References:
Dam, N. A. K., Le Dinh, T., & Menvielle, W. (2019). Marketing Intelligence from data mining perspective. International Journal of Innovation, Management and Technology, 10(5). 184–190. Web.
Kelly, S., Danheiser, S., & Johnston, P. (2017). Value-ology : Aligning sales and marketing to shape and deliver profitable customer value propositions. Palgrave Macmillan.