6 Ways B2B Customer Intelligence has Changed Forever
6 Ways B2B Customer Intelligence has Changed Forever
Customer intelligence is vital in developing effective B2B customer account strategies. In gathering and analyzing information regarding customer details and activities, companies use customer intelligence to build deeper and more effective customer relationships and improve strategic decision-making. Used appropriately, it can be highly effective in helping to target new clients or reduce account churn.
Just five to ten years ago, conducting customer intelligence would have meant developing customer questionnaires, collecting feedback and conducting some sort of SWOT or positioning analysis. The process was rather straightforward. It's not any more.
Social media has revolutionalized how we engage with one other and how companies gather information on their customers.
1. It's gotten personal
Sales teams now have wide access to publicly available customer intelligence without having to knock on the doors of their research departments. Gathering profiles of new contacts at important customer accounts can be as easy as tapping a few times on a computer keyboard.
Through the social media activities of a target company's staff, it is now possible to identify projects, new competence areas, travel plans, business relationships and open positions. Customer contacts who write blogs often provide valuable context and perspective to important business signals. All these combined can tell a lot about a company's strategy and initiatives and how to target them with marketing or sales messages and an attractive value proposition.
2. It's more open
Companies have traditionally developed sophisticated CRM systems based on sets of defined parameters. Capturing more information about customers was often limited and restrictive. Information often became outdated after a while and was tedious for a small CRM team to maintain.
Some of the more advanced companies today are developing open internal wikis on key customer accounts in order to enhance knowledge about them. The structure of the wikis can be relatively fluid and evolve over time. They can be edited and updated by any number of employees in a company and as editors need to sign in, the edits are traceable.
3. It's more informal
People are joining virtual professional communities in increasing numbers. LinkedIn groups, discussion forums or blogs, for instance, can facilitate collaborative processes with networks of existing and potential customers, often with people one has never met in person. Information about customer targets and prospects can sometimes be quickly collected through such informal networks, although such information should also be cross-referenced.
4. It's faster
Gathering customer profiles used to take weeks. Online customer polls and surveys can now be completed in a matter of days.
As people get used to both networking virtually and communicating on the go through smartphones and pocket computers, companies can gather the latest information on customer accounts from their own staff, business partners or vendors on the fly' on a daily basis.
5. It's more visual
Company organization charts are common tools in customer intelligence. It is now also easier to map out informal relationships with business partners outside of the organization chart and with the appropriate software, even map out relationships in three-dimension.
6. It's more workshops
Customer analysis used to be the mainstay of the research or sales team. These days, it has become increasingly popular to pool the internal expertise of various departments in developing sales strategies. Anyone from the legal, purchasing or logistics departments may be pulled into customer analysis workshops and challenged to think from the point of view of a company's customers. Presented with different future business and customer scenarios, they are asked to present business, product, marketing or sales plans. The collective knowledge and insights captured are then used as input into the sales strategy planning process.
Looking into the future
With social media networks, companies that conduct customer intelligence will be able to cast their nets out into more pools' of information. But as they rely more and more on informal sources, they will also spend more time verifying their data. As technology continues to evolve, we can also expect to see more interactive and three-dimensional customer intelligence tools develop.
On the other hand, it would not be surprising to see companies adopting stricter policies with regards to their employees' social media activities and corporate information that is distributed, both internally and externally. B2B companies that collect customer intelligence may also need to draw out clearer information collection and privacy policies.
This article and others from GIA's World Class Market Intelligence practice can be found at Global Intelligence Alliance functions.
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