How You Treat Your Customers & How IT Can Help

Greg Smart of inContact wrote a very interesting post this morning, "Do You Treat All of Your Customers the Same?  Stop It."  It's worth a read, as it harks back to our earlier posts on the benefits of mapping IT to the customer process.  Do you know your customers well enough to be able to distinguish the best customers from the average customers?  As you read Greg's post, think more broadly in terms of your own customer base; while you may not have a call center, you do have customer relationships that need to be mined. 

IT is sitting on a wealth of information - a gold mine of information in fact, about your customers, how they behave, what they do, when they do it, and how they react to stimuli (promotions, emails, etc.) from your organization.  How can you leverage this information to drive revenue?  Can you also leverage this information to reduce costs?  If you aren't already providing the vast amounts of stored information in an easily-consumed-and-digested format, you are missing a key opportunity to integrate IT with the business.

From Greg's post:  "...there are an endless number of ways to calculate and compare customers to determine which customers are better for your business. For some businesses it is purely a dollars thing. Which customers are the most profitable? Which customers spend the most money with us? Which customers are buying our most profitable products? For some businesses it may be more of a fundamental contribution. Which customers push us to be better? Which customers are asking hard questions that force us to get better? Which customers are asking for product improvements or products that we don’t have - pushing us ahead of our competition?  Once you know who those customers are you need to serve them differently.  These are the customers that are driving your business forward.  These are the customers that deserve more than just your average customer interaction."

For IT, one of the biggest challenges is taking all of the information that the organization gathers about customers, in all of the different systems that interact with clients or client processes, and creating a meaningful presentation of that information back to the business.  To advance the integration of IT with the business, integrate IT with the customer process.  From a technology perspective, it all boils down to results-driven business intelligence, which is the framework for using expected results and expected use as the basis for building the data storage (marts or warehouses) that makes the most sense for the business, then providing the user community with a meaningful way to interact with the business data.

When we say that business intelligence is one of the most significant ways that IT can impact a business, this is just one example of why we say it.  What other examples would you offer?