Customer analytics drive businesses forward 

Every day, your customers create data, whether they are aware of it or not. Their posts to social media sites, their online purchases and even their smartphone usage are a source of valuable information to your business. The question arises: what are you doing with this data? There is now so much information available to companies that it can be overwhelming to decide where to begin, let alone how to leverage its value. In a whitepaper from IBM entitled “Customer Analytics Pay Off,” authors detail what firms can do to gather data and extract value from it to be successful and competitive.

This whitepaper’s authors employ a conceptual framework to describe the four stages of organizational capabilities, and how four customer analytics strategies enable that development. The first capability is gaining insight from this information explosion and gaining a deeper insight into customers. Organizations that have entered that stage have applied a customer analytics strategy that lowers the cost of accessing and deriving value from customer data.

The second stage is the ability to share information internally and across the value chain. Businesses that are in this phase have adopted a clear customer analytics strategy that enables the sharing of data. Without such a strategy, information stays within a silo and the people who need it most cannot make use of it.