Relationships with customers are critical and the level of service provided, not just the quality and cost of the product, are now the key drivers as companies seek to address the efficient and effective management of their customer base.
E-intelligence is already a vital ingredient in any mechanism to integrate knowledge about business performance. Information is power: it also provides the key to opening the door to competitive advantage in an ever increasingly competitive global market, where the Internet and e-commerce are placing greater emphasis on the need to capture and analyse data-rich customer information.
Says Andre Zitzke, Chief Technology Officer at SAS Institute SA: "Companies have to access and integrate their customer-related operational data to understand and predict customer behaviour and build one-to-one relationships to meet the very specific needs of their target audiences. Gathering and analysing data is only one element of this process, vital though it is. It is also of paramount importance to ensure that information is communicated to the right people in the correct place in a timely fashion.
"On the Web, the loyalty of customers and other visitors tends towards zero. Visitors are invisible, so without e-intelligence they are virtually unknown quantities. And they will remain so, so long as the focus remains fixed on building the perfect Web infrastructure."
According to Zitzke, a perfect infrastructure cannot in itself deliver competitive advantage. Only those companies that put intelligence behind their Web strategy will survive.
"However," he explains, "businesses should not down-play the importance of the infrastructure itself. In fact, the infrastructure also requires e-intelligence to drive it successfully. Without e-intelligence, it is difficult for managers to get a true picture of usage patterns or to predict when capacity will be exceeded."
Zitzke maintains that the bottom line is that in e-business, few if any are going to survive on raw instinct alone. "The rest of us will just have to learn to adapt. And it is already clear that the most knowledgeable and adaptable will be the most e-intelligent," he concludes.
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