Last post, I talked about 7 important requirements for successfully creating and leveraging Customer Intelligence (CI). Today, I’d like to go back to an earlier thread and review 6 important, defining characteristics for CI:

(1) CI is cultural, a deep-in-the-bones commitment on the part of everyone in the organization to learn as much as possible about the customer and use that knowledge to build better and more profitable customer relationships.

(2) CI is organizational: without specific functions in the organization that are focused on the development and use of customer intelligence throughout the organization, efforts will fail.

(3) CI is interdisciplinary, making use of techniques from statistics, marketing, technology, human resources, public relations, communications, and others. Too often a narrow focus on technology dooms customer intelligence efforts from the start.

(4) CI is 2-way: Part of the Customer Intelligence Manifesto is that ye shall listen to your customers for they shall speak the truth – without 2-way communication, a valuable source of customer knowledge – the customer himself – is ignored.

(5) CI is aware of and informed by customer profitability. It’s fine to know who your customers are and what they want, but unless this is married to an understanding of which customers are profitable and which are not, there is a significant danger that customer intelligence efforts will result in lower, not higher, profitability for the organization, as efforts are directed against the wrong customers.

(6) Finally, CI is customer-centric: the whole reason for implementing Customer Intelligence in the first place is to focus on the customer as the source of profitability, the key driver of revenues and profits, and in fact the organization’s reason for being.

Now that we’ve got the core characteristics of successful CI, in my next post I’ll contrast this by talking about 6 things that Customer Intelligence is not!