Customer Insight

Creating Value Through Customer Insight

In a web-based world with increasingly powerful customers, it is essential to understand what customers value. A deep understanding of customers provides companies the basis for offering the right products and services through the best channels at the most appropriate time. The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) approach provides companies a better understanding of what their clients value most about products and services.

The Challenge Facing Many Companies

In their efforts to attract, grow and retain profitable customers, companies face a considerable challenge: to "get to know" those customers. Understanding a customer's needs and preferences, and then using that knowledge to offer personalized products and services, is a critical task as we move from a seller-driven to a buyer-driven business environment.

Consumers today have nearly instant access to information that provides them with choices and makes it easy to compare providers. Customers expect companies to keep track of their changing preferences so they can offer more personalized products and services.

The traditional seller-driven approach, characterized by company-defined, standardized products that are marketed to broad customer segments, falls short in such an environment. A customer-driven approach, in which customer needs and wants are understood across the organization at the individual level, is required. This is especially true with today's emerging web-based, customer-driven competitors, who aim to take away customers from incumbents.

To know your customers and meet their needs, you must find solutions to address some basic challenges:

• Data Collection - What data about customers should be collected? How do I ensure that the data is comprehensive, accurate, and easy to access? What kind of real-time data do I collect and for what purpose do I use it?
• Predictive analysis - What is the best way to determine which customers will buy which products through which channels? How do I determine which customers are most valuable?
• Optimization - How do I optimize the results of marketing efforts, given limited resources available for marketing to and servicing customers across multiple products and channels? Given that there are more advanced tools available at all stages of customer insight, in what sequence and combination do I use them in order to optimize results for the company?

To gain better insight of your customers, it takes accurate orchestration of four key components: Strategy, , Process, People and Technology. Let TMG work on your next CRM solution.