Recent shakeups on Forrester’s Customer Intelligence team provided an opportunity to take a good look at our listening platform and social intelligence coverage. Long tagged as the responsibility of the social media team, we believe that “customer listening” should encompass numerous sources of feedback – from the call center, to voice of customer programs, to enterprise feedback management, to ethnographic and traditional market research – to really listen to the customer. CI researcher Allison Smith and I are working on a new series of reports around this concept – for now we're calling it Enterprise Customer Listening.

What is Enterprise Customer Listening, and why do we need it?
 
The Age Of The Customer makes it more important than ever to keep close tabs on what your customers and prospects are saying about your brand. As companies progress toward social intelligence maturity – full integration of social data into existing business strategies and technologies – many are checking the "listening" box, but we think that they aren't thinking broadly enough. The opportunity to listen to customers isn't limited to a single channel, and the unsolicited, unstructured feedback in each channel becomes more valuable when coupled with insights from others. Capturing, managing, and understanding the breadth of what customer's say can ignite the customer’s influence across the enterprise – giving you competitive advantage.
 
So, what do you think?
 
Are you adopting Enterprise Customer Listening – or a version of it – at your company? Is it building on or linked with a social intelligence initiative, or completely separate? Allison and I would love to hear what you’re doing in the comments below, or via email – dfrankland@forrester.com, asmith@forrester.com
Cheers,
Dave