THE VALUE OF CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE:

There is an important purpose behind the effort to establish greater customer
intelligence. Bringing together a single view of the customer with high-value
analytics can serve to optimize customer interactions, reduce operational costs,
and enhance revenue-generating opportunities. To begin, most organizations
have multiple records and accounting for the same customer, with no consistent
information transfer across business units within the same organization. This
condition leads to the absence of a single view of the customer and leads to
inconsistent customer experiences. Much time and effort are wasted collating
reports and gathering information, rather than focusing valuable resources on
analyzing high-value information and knowledge. Much of the marketing effort,
which is intended to build a demand, is focused on mass-market techniques,
rather than the preferred targeted segments that offer the most lucrative returns
on the effort. The inability to target the right customer at the right time, with
no predictive modeling capabilities, exacerbates the problem and leads to expending
corporate energies on low- versus high-level customers and a total lack
of optimized service levels.
Solutions to these complications can add dramatically to the firm�s performance,
including such features as:
Data management personnel savings
Faster call handling of inbound inquiries
Prospect and customer solicitation savings
Reduction in returned communications
Improved data quality in critical operational systems
Improved targeting for cross-sell, up-sell, retention, and acquisition
campaigns
Lower customer attrition or churn rates
More importantly, attaining such conditions puts the internal house in order
and brings the firm to the point of being able to approach customer intelligence
in a more contemporary manner. By today�s standards, CRM has become the
deployment of strategies, processes, and enabling technologies that are used to
acquire, develop, and retain an organization�s best customers. It includes understanding
customer needs, the relative importance of each customer segment,
and the best, most economical means to meet those needs. Within an environment
focused on this view of CRM, strategy, processes, organization, and culture
begin to revolve around a central focus dedicated to satisfying customers in the
most appropriate manner and sustaining those with most strategic value indefinitely.
Businesses adopting such an environment recognize that performing the Process orientation
has never had more meaning in this environment. Organizations
that remain internally fragmented and operate in a stovepipe manner
will never achieve the advantages cited. They will be doomed to local optimizations
within some business units and be prevented from achieving network
process and systems optimization. Such systems as enterprise resource planning,
CRM, and collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment simply
will never be achieved in an optimal manner due to the process inefficiencies
that will occur. Process design and enablement with new technologies and
methodologies and tools are what will provide the greatest opportunity to increase
corporate performance in the modern era. The drivers behind this return
to a process focus, moreover, will be an enhanced customer-controlled environment,
where customer satisfaction is the real end objective, with use of the
Internet to create and control the sharing of valuable knowledge.
When ASCM and CRM converge in this advanced level of the evolution,
some important characteristics will be apparent:
Demand management and forecasting will be at improved levels, with
actual need matched with capability to supply.
Sales and operations planning will move to advanced planning and
scheduling, where key suppliers and customers participate in diagnostics
and planning sessions to bring a reality to the planning and supply
processing.
Inventory management will be a network effort, in which the linked
allies work to deliver the right goods to the point of need in the right
quantities at the right time.
Visibility into the end-to-end processing will be on-line, real time, allowing
the constituents to view what is taking place, track important
events, and adapt the supply chain to ever-changing market conditions
faster and more accurately than the competition.
Event management will be at the highest possible level of effectiveness,
as the reactions to any planned sales effort will be instantly relayed back
to the important upstream partners, so they can react appropriately to
actual event conditions and results.
Investment in the extended enterprise will be driven by the good of the
whole network, not just individual partners� local shareholder needs.