One of the biggest business challenges in the 21st century is to fully live up to the promise of data-driven decision making. Companies invested a lot of money and resources in building data warehouses, customer data platforms, and data tracking strategies over the past years. But more often than not, this data is not used to its full extent. It is one thing to gather the data – and completely another thing to actually utilize it. Here are some major benefits of using customer intelligence (CI).
Strategy
Today, it is virtually impossible to put together a good business strategy without including customer intelligence as a vital tool for decision making and measurement of marketing effectiveness.
Building trust
One of the biggest challenges is building trust with consumers who are increasingly skeptical and tired of marketing, advertising, and the media. This can be observed in many different aspects of business, for example in lower conversion rates. By speaking to consumers directly and personally, brands can establish a relationship of trust.
User experience
Visitors can leave a website in a second. With a simple click. And as standards for online experiences improve, customers’ expectations are increasing.
It’s no longer enough to segment users by basic demographics to speak to them, businesses need to treat each customer as an individual. For that to be possible, they must get to know them first.
Brand awareness & sales
Without CI it is impossible to offer the most relevant, engaging, and seamless personalized customer experiences in order to increase retention, brand loyalty, and sales.
Prediction
Customer intelligence enables businesses to create a 360-degree, omnichannel view of the customers, providing rich context and behavioral insights that can even serve as input for the prediction of future consumer behavior with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
Fast (re)action
One of the most obvious marketing problems comes from the incapacity to get fast consumer insights to take action on. Because of that, decisions are often made blind; campaign creative is based on guessing, communication is built around imagined personas, and media planning is done by pure intuition. On top of this, it’s tricky to track the results of marketing efforts, anyway. With the help of the right CI solution, companies can make decisions instantly and with confidence.
