Suffering from siloed customer data? Time to get that business in order!

Companies today are able to capture a wealth of customer data and information, but oftentimes the biggest challenge is figuring out how to manage and use this data. In the past, a "one size fits all" approach may have been acceptable but today's savvy customers expect a personalized experience; and companies who can differentiate themselves by providing the best customer experience will find their competitive edge.In Aberdeen Group's report "Customer Analytics, Leveraging Big Data to Achieve Big Results" (Omer Minkara, June 2012), they found that companies that centralize and operationalize customer intelligence (compared to those who don't) have 3.5x higher retention rates, achieve 20% year-over-year customer lifetime value growth, and 90% greater year-over-year annual company revenues.Unfortunately, many organizations suffer from fragmented views of customer information across their various departments (i.e. help desk, contact center, CRM, etc). For example, a sales rep may reach out to an existing customer with the intention to upsell or cross-sell not knowing they had a bad experience with the product because this documentation was only known to the service rep in contact. Customer data should spread like gossip or wildfire - everyone should know what's going on! A solution to this challenge is to integrate multiple internal sources of customer data into a single view that can be accessed across the board, in an organized fashion of course.There is a stark difference between top performers who implement these customer analytics programs versus the bottoms one who don't. These are their stats:

• Customer retention (top 84%, bottom 26%)
• Customer lifetime value (top +19.2%, bottom +0.7% year-over-year)
• Customer satisfaction (top +18%, bottom -1.0% year-over-year)
• Return on marketing investment (top +15.2%, bottom +0.2%)

These stats underline the importance and business value of using customer analytics to drive customer-centric management activities. It's time to get rid of the siloed data practices and help your organization, as a whole, paint the bigger picture.