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Operationalizing customer intelligence in the contact center: if you had customer intelligence, what would you do with it?

Article Excerpt
Most customer service executives spend a considerable amount of time thinking about the need to change their contact center from a cost/service-oriented operation to one oriented toward profit/loyalty. A key capability in this migration will be the center's ability to act on customer intelligence.

Computer Sciences Corporation recently surveyed more than 750 Fortune 1000 executives regarding their customer intelligence (CI) efforts and found operationalizing customer insights to consistently be the weakest of the three CI capabilities (customer information integration, customer insights, and customer insight operationalization.):

* 69 percent of respondents have not yet made customer insights available to their customer facing personnel.

* 54 percent do not differentiate service to their "best" customers.

* 70 percent do not have defined business rules in place when customers present a supportable need outside traditional sales and service situations.

Most contact center managers still repeat the same tired metrics to their executives: service level, average handle time (AHT), number of interactions and abandon rate. No wonder senior management yawns and acts like customer service is a cost center.

This article describes the actions that should be taken to prepare for CI operationalization, and the initiatives customer service executives should champion to ensure success in CI execution. This will enable the contact center manager to discuss metrics like customer defection saves, service-to-sales conversions, and cross- and up-sell ratios with management, and talk about what the center is doing to increase the loyalty of the company's most valuable customers.

Preliminaries

Before plunging directly into the operationalization of CI, it will be useful to review a few basics of the subject, starting with a definition of customer intelligence:

Customer intelligence is the ability to use information about a customer to foster deeper relationships that generate greater profitability. It is also the basis for targeting new customers based on matching key attributes of best customers.

Customer intelligence is a multi-dimensional business problem:

1. Customer information integration

-- Is your data clean and trusted by users?

-- Have you compiled a 360-degree view of the customer?

2. Customer insights: Segmentation/modeling

-- Do you know the preferences, needs and value of each customer?

-- Can you predict the likelihood of a customer defecting, buying or responding?

3. Customer insight operationalization

-- Have you integrated analytic insights into front-office applications?

-- Are you able to customize treatments to the individual customer?

Company capabilities generally fall into one of four progressively higher rankings within each of these CI dimensions (Figure 1).

* Basic -- No 360-degree view of the customer, excessive manual analysis

* Foundational -- Common customer ID, customer segmentation

* Advanced -- Complete customer view, treatments driven by value segments

* Distinctive -- Differentiated products and services by segment, insight-driven interactions

Together, the CI dimensions and capabilities rankings form a useful diagnostic model a manager can use to assess where they are and where they want to be in developing meaningful relationships, relevant offers and proactive services.

Operationalization Of CI

Operationalizing customer intelligence occurs at many points in the corporation: The CEO needs it to make strategic decisions; product development needs it for new product design; marketing needs it for data mining and modeling; finance needs it to understand customer profitability: and IT needs it for data provisioning and report production.

Similarly, the contact center needs customer insights in order to present a customer interaction experience that is consistent with corporate marketing and communication messages and business revenue and profitability goals. So what does the contact center manager need to do to take advantage of corporate customer knowledge? Key activities are:

* Identify who is interacting with the corporation

* Get the interaction to the resource best able to handle...

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