In my last post, titled The Multichannel Campaign Management Triple Play, I talked about the three main customer challenges that we solve with our Customer Intelligence solutions – namely finding the best growth opportunities, taking the best marketing action, and then maximizing cross business impact. I promised I would be back to detail those three challenges out, and that is what I want to do today – starting with the first challenge of finding the most profitable growth opportunities.

Finding growth opportunities – and more importantly profitable growth opportunities – inside of an organization – can be a tough task. It’s important to keep in mind here that a customer can be profitable, but not valuable – and vice versa. So ensure that your profitable customers are also valuable customers.

Let me offer a few ways that we can find profitable, valuable customers. Some of these methods are as old as the term database marketing, and others, well not so much. In order to understand things like behavior, sentiment, and value- we must first have a holistic view of our customer base. That is where creating a common view of customers and prospects comes in. This means creating an enterprise look via a common data platform (think enterprise data warehouse) of our customer. Data silos or marts will not do. We want to see the customer end to end, across departments inside of the organization.

Once this is done, we move to stage two – which is scaling the acts of clustering, profiling, and segmenting our customer base. This can be done via a variety of manners, but must be executed in order to getter a better view into key customer drivers. Once we have our customers split into manageable segments, we can model and score them to obtain likelihoods to respond, spend, attrite, etc. This technique allows us to then set thresholds for communication based on scores important to our organization.

Stage three of really finding profitable growth opportunities focuses on understanding customer value through behavior and sentiment. Once stages one and two are complete – we can then combine that information with sentiment – how a customer feels about a product or service and behavior – how they react, purchase or engage with our organization - to get an even deeper view into what motivates customers.

Understanding this information – even down to the individual customer level – gives us the insight that we need to then take the best marketing action. We will focus on this second customer issue in my next post...stay tuned!