Acxiom’s first annual customer intelligence survey
by Tate Olinghouse
It sounds like a simple enough question, but in today’s increasingly complex and competitive market, the answer could be the difference between success and failure, profit and loss. The challenges facing brands are momentous.
While consumers still have money to spend, rising prices mean brands are competing fiercely for a shrinking number of transactions and are having to work harder to move from conversions into relationships.
At the same time customer expectations for personalized, meaningful experiences are skyrocketing. Brands need to enable these experiences across a continually expanding range of online and offline channels, all while navigating a changing privacy and identity landscape.
The stats are clear. Almost 90% of consumers think the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. And three-quarters expect brands to understand their unique needs.1 The only way to meet these high expectations is by gaining in-depth knowledge of the customer – what they want and how they behave – through data-driven Customer Intelligence (CI). The pressing need for an effective CI strategy won’t be news to the majority of brands.
Most already know that using data to understand people can help them acquire new prospects, retain existing customers, and grow trusting relationships. But they also know how hard implementing CI across an organization can be.
The ongoing expansion of digital channels provides an exciting opportunity to really get to know their customers, but it also means wrangling a mass of complexity, fragmentation, and siloed data. The data exhaust generated by a customer’s digital interactions is massive – and continually growing – so determining which data points really matter and which can be ignored is a difficult task in itself.
A proliferation of technologies designed to make sense of various data types can just add to the challenge if they’re not integrated effectively and used to create a single customer view. The journey to CI maturity is a long and complicated one, and it isn’t always easy to determine what point a brand has reached. So, we commissioned a study from international strategy and research agency MTM to build a detailed view of the market and uncover how brands across the US and the UK are really making use of data-driven intelligence.
Rather than just exploring their views on CI, we aimed to dig deeper and discover the quality of the data brands are using, as well as what infrastructure is in place to support intelligence. We wanted to find out whether customer insights are actually driving strategic decision making and how they are ultimately translated into action.
This report is the result, and it reveals a fascinatingly nuanced picture of the intelligence landscape. It explores multiple facets of CI maturity and gauges where brands sit in that complex journey. It also explains what they need to do to move forward to a point where they can engage customers on their own terms through personalized, relevant, and respectful experiences. In short, where they can use CI to differentiate their brands and gain a competitive advantage. I’ll ask the question again. How well do you understand your customers? It’s time to find out. Tate Olinghouse Chief Client Officer
Fuente: https://go.cmswire.com/