A key area that SAPinsiders highlight as one of the top business challenges: evolving customer expectations and demand. This has emerged as a top business driver in many of our research reports, including the most recent report, SAPinsider Process Automation and SAP S/4HANA. To meet the rapidly evolving customer expectation and demands, organizations need to understand their customer better, and this is where customer intelligence (CI) comes into play. In simple terms, CI is all about gathering and analyzing customer data to understand your customers better. Considering the increased focus in this area, we have a research report focused on CI scheduled to be published in Dec 2022. This article discusses the advantages of building CI capabilities and explores the key elements required to build this capability.

Advantages of Building Customer Intelligence Capabilities

The advantages of building CI capabilities are summarized below: Customer Loyalty: Customer loyalty is increasingly becoming a challenge in the age where customers have a plethora of options available and the competition in each market is intensifying. Understanding your customer preferences and the product attributes they align with, through customer intelligence, can help you define your loyalty strategy. Market Dynamics: In today's rapidly evolving market, customer intelligence can help you gauge how the customer demand for you as well as for the overall industry is evolving. An example is getting real-time insights into customer churn for you as well for the overall industry. This can help you formulate dynamic planning to address undesirable demand changes. Transforming Sales: As CI can help you track your customer journey and leverage analytics to identify areas within the journey that can be made more efficient, you can leverage these insights for transforming your sales function. Marketing Agility: Overall, data from CI can help build a marketing function that is much more responsive to changes in customer demand and expectations, thereby addressing a key challenge that has consistently been identified by SAPinsiders.

Steps Towards Building Customer Intelligence Capabilities

Organizations today generate a massive amount of customer data. This data flows to them through multiple channels (including customer activity on company websites, apps, and communications initiated by customers) and contains embedded insights that have the potential to transform a business . While the overall process is an intricate mix of strategy, processes and technologies, at a high level, the following steps need to be leveraged to build customer intelligence capabilities: Collect your Data- The first step in building customer intelligence is the ability to collect all the customer information across all the channels. This data then also needs to be transformed such that there is a single archive of data that can be analyzed effectively. This singularity of view, is known as a single customer view and is an extremely important first step. Generate Insights- The next step then pertains to the infrastructure needed to analyze the data. Modern customer intelligence solutions allow companies to diver deeper into customer insights based on customer lifecycle: newly acquired customer, active customer, customer churn, and so on. These are just examples of some attributes or measures that can be leveraged. Off-the-shelf solutions and open-source AI and ML capabilities allow you to gain insights that are very much customized to your needs. Execute on Insights- Recommendations or insights from analytics tools are useless unless they are understood in the right context, used for optimal planning, and then executed. It is critical to understand how you can use CI insights to transform your strategy. Going back to the churn example, if you believe that your customers are churning fast for a specific product line, how can you use the data, with other CI data on that specific customer segment, to address the churn issue.