Customer Intelligence Needs A New Breed Of Marketing Scientist

A mature customer intelligence (CI) function needs optimized data processes, cutting-edge technologies, and the right analytics talent. Analysts add value to CI with their data-mining and data-diagnosis skills. To effectively embed analytics into an organization's decision-making fabric, analysts also need a business-oriented mindset to make their findings more relevant to the business. Forrester recommends nurturing business-savvy analysts and marketing scientists with a penchant both to build statistical models and to use the output to craft customer growth strategies. This report is an update to the report of the same title, originally published on February 6, 2012. It has been updated to include recent survey data on analytics staffing trends.