Regardless of the service rendered, customers always seek a positive experience where product, feature, pricing and placement expectations are satisfied. A business or organization’s ability to provide such an experience is directly related to the quality of customer intelligence collected. Today organizations rely on information management software that produce usage reports, behavior analysis and experience monitoring to gauge the overall satisfaction of the customer.
Listen to More than what the Customer Says
As customers rarely verbalize the feedback needed to ensure positive service experiences, companies rely on information management tools to gain the necessary customer insight. Information management tools enable organization to track usage, behaviors and overall experience of its customers and make business decisions based on key trends by sifting through large amounts of corporate data to identify things like customer buying habits, corporate inefficiencies or product availability.
- USAGE: Tracking the services customers use most, how long each service is being used and how frequently enables organizations to better manage the success of existing services. Usage reports can be created on any level from account or project summaries to individual usage trends. Understanding what services customers are using and how they are being used enables companies to effectively manage service delivery.
- BEHAVIOR: Customer behavior is another significant indicator of an organization’s services. Behavior analysis can often identify necessary service adjustments. Beyond standard demographic information, organizations must also perform market segmentation categorizing customers with like behaviors and predictive modeling using previous customer interactions to predict future events. Being able to identify the specific behaviors a customer exhibits enables organizations to design services geared to specific clientele instead of a generic or impersonal service.
- EXPERIENCE: Measuring customer experience related to the services received is most often done by tracking the performance and availability of that service from the vantage point of the customer. Poor customer experiences, help desk complaints, inventory backlog reports, etc, is often the result of a mismatch between service delivery and customer expectations. An organizations ability to identify negative experiences and mitigate reoccurrence helps improve future service and maximize efficiency.
A Shifting Information Management Industry
Although the idea of information management is not new, it has gained significant attention in recent years. Many analysts anticipate that the market is about to enter a period of significant demand from companies and government agencies and has resulted in the buy-out of independent software developers by major technology companies who were too slow to launch their own product, including IBM’s acquisition of Cognos in November, SAP’s purchase of Business Objects in October and Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion.
Recognized enterprise products dedicated to information management and customer intelligence include IBM WebSphere, Microsoft Dynamic CRM, SAP Business Objects and SAS. Each product integrates data to enable the simple gathering or customer intelligence though extracting, cleansing, transforming, conforming, aggregating, loading and managing data to support data warehousing, migration, synchronization and federation initiatives and supports both batch-oriented and real-time data management solutions, and creates real-time data integration services in support of service-oriented architectures.
Putting it Together
Traditionally, a wall has existed between organizational analysts viewing business information and IT personnel viewing device, system or network information. The wall is coming down. Technology now supports almost every business service in some way, and as competition is demanding service assurance at the consumer and device level, the IT organization and the line of business must work from the same information. The line of business needs to understand how services are delivered and IT must respond when individual customer service is impacted.
Windward has worked for years with clients to ensure that services supported by information or communication technology is delivered to each and every customer. We have watched the merging of business and IT, and we are firmly in the game helping our clients make this integration happen.