Our Customers in Marketing and Sales like (Database) Marketing Managers, Marketeers and CRM Managers are all facing the same challenge to improve the return on marketing spend. Questions that they are asking Crystalloids are:

"How can I attract more and better customers?"

"How can I grow existing customers?"

"How can I increase the conversion on my direct marketing?"

"How can I retain my valuable customers longer?"

"How can I transform a service call into a successful sales call?"

"How can I decrease my marketing costs without losing revenues?”

The answer to these questions is embedded in our Customer Intelligence Solution.

Customer Intelligence is the discipline within Customer Relationship Management that uses Advanced Analytics to optimize all customer interactions. Each customer interaction is an opportunity to improve the value of your customer, but only if you are able to make the right offer at the right time.

Customer Intelligence is the key to provide the necessary customer knowledge. It is the process of collecting customer data, analyzing customer behavior, exploiting customer knowledge and evaluating customer response.

Collecting customer data

Vital to Customer Intelligence is customer data. The more data you collect on your customers the more knowledge you gain on your customers. But collecting data is not enough, it needs to be transformed in what we call a 360 degrees enterprise view. The enterprise view contains customer characteristics to provide a total picture of the customer. Examples of customer characteristics are age and gender and more advanced characteristics are average spent per visit and number of days since last transaction. An enterprise view can range from 100 to 1000 or more characteristics, depending on the complexity of the organization. Having an enterprise view enables you to analyze the behavior of your customers.

Technologies that we use to collect customer data are databases, data warehouses, ODS (Operational Data Storages), ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load) and SOA (Service Oriented Architectures).

Analyzing customer behavior

Past customer behavior is the best prediction for future customer behavior. If you want to sell a car insurance you can look at your customers that already have a car insurance. Not to sell them another car insurance, but to find lookalikes that do not have a car insurance yet. Another example: Which customers will most probably churn in the coming months? Answer: The lookalikes of the customers that churned in the previous months. Can it be that simple? Yes, if you have the necessary requirements: a 360 degrees enterprise view, advanced analytical applications like Predictive Analytics and skilled employees, you are able to turn customer behavior into customer knowledge.

Technologies that we use to analyze customer behavior are advanced analytical applications like Statistical Analysis, Forecasting and Predictive Analytics with techniques like association, classification, and segmentation.

Exploiting customer knowledge

Customer knowledge alone is not enough, it must be made actionable. It needs to be exploited in every interaction with the customer, both outbound and inbound. In outbound interactions, initiated by the organization, customer knowledge helps you to decide who to contact, when to contact, what to propose and through what channel. In inbound interactions, initiated by the customer, the customer, the channel and the timing are given. Still customer knowledge can help you decide what to propose.

Technologies that we use to exploit customer knowledge are campaign management and optimization, event-based marketing and real-time marketing.

Evaluating customer response

An organization that uses customer intelligence needs to measure the response of each customer interaction. You need to learn from every interaction to improve the relationship with the customer and to increase the customer value. Every interaction, whether it is an outbound interaction or an inbound interaction, must be tested and evaluated. Only then will you become a Predictive Enterprise.

Technologies that we use to evaluate customer response are applications for Standard Reporting and Querying like Reporting, Querying, Slicing and Dicing, Dashboards and Alerts.

Read more on Customer Intelligence in Our References.