Trends Report

Should Your Firm Work With A Customer Engagement Agency?

How To Decide Whether And When To Hire A CEA

May 10th, 2012
Fatemeh Khatibloo, null
Fatemeh Khatibloo
With contributors:
Dave Frankland , Allison Smith

Summary

Customer intelligence (CI) professionals play an important role in a firm's evolution in the age of the customer — with many gaining C-suite visibility and achieving more-strategic positioning across the organization as a whole. As CI professionals evolve, so too do their requirements for their outsourced providers and agencies. For these advanced teams, customer engagement agencies (CEAs) represent the changing needs and mindset of CI. However, while many CI teams aspire to work with a CEA, many of them will find that their organizations' CI maturity is not yet strategic enough to optimize these agencies. In fact, for these clients, attempting to engage an emerging CEA may prove deeply problematic. This report provides a self-test that CI pros should use to determine their organizational readiness for a CEA partnership.

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