Preparing For The Intelligent Enterprise: A Blueprint For Customer Intelligence Professionals

Despite an abundance of customer-related data, most companies still struggle to understand their customers — lacking the culture, process, technology, data, measurement framework, and business relevance to drive business success through customer knowledge. As companies become more customer-centric, Customer Intelligence (CI) professionals must evolve their role to meet the needs of organizations that capture data from multiple channels and through a variety of methods. By combining with other sources of customer data, particularly the market insights (MI) function, CI can help create a more adaptive intelligence function and deliver greater revenue, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. We expect a new kind of intelligence organization to emerge, combining the old roles of market research and database marketing into a consolidated customer strategy function. This report examines how both functions must prepare for this change and what pieces of the evolution Customer Intelligence professionals must drive.