Customer intelligence is all about growing your business - Phil Winters

At a recent customer intelligence event hosted by SAS Institute, Phil Winters, global customer intelligence guru, revealed that customer intelligence is about understanding the behaviour, profitability and risk of your customers.

"Customer intelligence for me is all about the creation of new insight that wasn't there, its about solving business pains and growing your business using a process that is tailored to your customers and your industry," says Phil Winters, managing senior partner for Customer Intelligence Agenda.

Covering everything from the basics of what a customer actually is, to how to use customer intelligence to gain, cross-/up-sell and retain customers, Winters highlighted that customer intelligence is about putting your understanding of your customers at the centre of everything your business does.

Creating new intelligence in your business is really a four-step process beginning with focusing on a goal or issue creating specific insight for that issue, applying that insight in an appropriate form for your measuring and then measuring the success. "Unfortunately, vast majorities of companies often fail in the execution and measurement of their planned solutions," add Winters.

Working at Customer Intelligence Agenda, which Winters fondly refers to as CIA, has exposed him to a number of successful case studies where clients have implemented a customer-centric strategy.

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Barclays Bank UK was one such success story: seeing their rising competition and wanting to retain and gain customers through excellent customer service they implemented a solution that allowed their customers to receive a voice activated approval or decline for a home loan by phone in less than one minute. A simple solution yes, but one that satisfied their customers needs and generated revenue for the business.

"It doesn't matter if the home loan is declined, what matters is that they knew the answer within a minute and they could recommend to their friends that they also check for a home loan in a minute thereby massively increasing the reach of their home loan programme - that is what applying customer intelligence is all about."

"An example like Barclays really puts insight into a usable form. They focused on the issue at hand and thought of an original way to make their customers' lives easier," says Winters.

Winters also highlighted that for successful implementation to take place you have to look at your frontline and those "human touch points". Its human nature to ask "what's in it for me" and there needs to be a way of motivating your staff to embrace the idea of using insight to make them more successful in their work with customers. At the end of the day customer intelligence is about knowing your customers well enough to tailor to their needs. From small things like how your customers prefer to interact with your company whether they prefer using Internet, phone or paper forms, and providing them with the methods they want. Cater to your customers' needs and they will never go looking elsewhere for the services you deliver.

"The only ways to grow your business are to retain customers, gain customer and up-sell and cross-sell to your existing customers. Leading organisations have proven that starting with focused applications of customer intelligence toward specific issues generates an ongoing revenue stream from your key growth asset - your customers," ends Winters.