The Customer Intelligence Checklist

Following on from my posts a couple of months ago, I’ve outlined a few tips that you may find useful to help you to develop customer intelligence within your organisation:

1. Ensure that the customer intelligence objectives are in line the organisations strategic objectives. 

Customer intelligence objectives and strategic objectives shouldn’t be treated as two separate entities by the organisations. The customer intelligence objectives should form part of the strategic objectives. If they remain separate, they run a very high risk of being treated as abstract targets. It also means that they treated as an afterthought, with the findings likely to be overlooked and less resources available to develop customer intelligence. Get top level buy-in!

2. Demonstrate the benefits of the customer intelligence to the organisation.

So much energy can be expended on collating customer data and creating intelligence, that its successes as a result are not communicated effectively enough. Developing customer intelligence is a continuous process and the collection of customer data is usually on top of a persons ‘day job’. The inevitable ‘what on earth are we doing this information’ question will arise, so its vital that the improvements being done as a result of customer intelligence is regularly marketed to maintain buy-in. 

3. Justify the need for customer intelligence.

Cataloguing and measuring the successes as a result of customer intelligence is important to demonstrate its cost benefits to the organisation. Developing customer intelligence can be an expensive process for organisations, so you should be measuring the impact to justify the need for it. 

4. Plan ahead

The first step of customer intelligence is to be clear on the objectives behind developing it. By its nature, customer intelligence is meant to be a proactive process with an aim to achieve something for the organisation. You need to be aware of what the organisation wants to simply reacting to things that have already happened and risk the intelligence becoming out of date and irrelevant.

5. Use your customer intelligence.

Customer intelligence is about tailoring products and services for customers. It’s about improving the customer experience, so the organisation gives itself a better opportunity to identify and meet their needs and preferences. The organisation’s customer intelligence process needs to be built into its customer strategy to ensure that its customer groups are identifiable and that their needs and preferences are regularly identified and affirmed.

6. Customer intelligence doesn’t stand alone
Customer intelligence related work should not be treated in isolation. Compare it to previous information and outcomes. Use it alongside benchmarking information and market intelligence to develop a better a better competitive advantage for the organisation (Grimes, 2009).

Ok well that’s it for today..... Next time: a crowdsourcing software review!

References

GRIMES, N., 2009. The nine steps to best practice customer insight, My Customer.Com. [online] Available at: <http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/customer-intelligence/best-practice-insight-what-essential-invisible-eye> [cited 30 October 2011].

Customer Intelligence: The game changer - Part 2

In my last post I defined what customer intelligence is, its purpose & benefits. This post is about how to develop customer intelligence for the organisation. 

Customer intelligence! How do we do it?

Developing good customer intelligence takes time, money and effort, but in exchange the sizeable benefits for organisations include better streamlining of services, better allocation of resources, more tailored products and improved customer satisfaction levels. But how do we develop this intelligence?

Data can be developed intelligence across four stages. I've illustrated the journey in the following model:

Each stage presents a number of questions and actions that an organisation has to answer and to do respectively to develop its knowledge.

Stage 1: Set out your customer intelligence objectives

This stage involves establishing why you are developing customer intelligence. As I’ve mentioned before, developing customer intelligence can be a costly, resource heavy and usually an extremely lengthy exercise. This stage involves developing a business case for this work, to justify its need for the organisation. This is the also the stage where the buy-in is sought from the various stakeholders, including the organisation as a whole especially the top tier, the users and suppliers. Ensure that you are clear as an organisation about why you are developing customer intelligence. I've jotted down a few questions that you may want to ask at this stage:

• Have you got a new product that you want to launch?
• Are you trying to improve an existing service?
• Are you trying to improve your market share?
• Is there a legislative/regulatory requirement?

Stage 2: Identify the data needed to create information

Sometimes organisations can spend so much time and energy on setting out its objectives and resourcing customer intelligence projects, that the most obvious needs of the organisations can be overlooked. Often the right data isn't collected, whether that’s missing out vital data or asking non relevant questions.

• Be clear about data you need to develop your customer intelligence. 
• Consult with the different departments in your organisation about what their customer intelligence needs are and what data do they need to develop it.
• Have somebody senior within the organisation who can approve (and veto) what data is collected. It’s not always possible to collect everything that everyone needs; otherwise the data collation exercise would become unmanageable.
• Remember the data will need to be processed into a structured form to convert it into information to meet your objectives.  Establish how you are going to do this, who will collect the data, who will convert it into information, what systems will you use.

Stage 3: Evaluate the information to develop knowledge

Evaluate the information to develop the customer intelligence. Use it to reflect on what you have learnt:

• What is it telling you about your customers? 
• What actions do you need to undertake based on the information to move closer to meeting your objectives?

Stage 4: Act on the customer Intelligence and evaluate the subsequent results

Take action based on your customer intelligence and evaluate the results

• What were the outcomes of your actions?
• Did they help you meet your objectives?
• Did the customer intelligence and subsequent actions yield the results that you expected?
• Did it reveal a need for developing new objectives or re-evaluating existing ones?

Customer intelligence costs organisation's time, money and effort to develop, so it’s important to maximise its success and justify its existence.Ok well that’s it for today..... 

References

GRIMES, N., 2009. The nine steps to best practice customer insight, My Customer.Com. [online] Available at: <http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/customer-intelligence/best-practice-insight-what-essential-invisible-eye> [cited 30 October 2011].

Customer Intelligence:The game changer - Part 1

The phrase 'know your customer’ is an often repeated mantra, in today’s business world. It’s a phrase that’s uttered in high level meetings and in weekly performance appraisals. The point is, that it’s vital for organisations to ‘know who their customers are’ and ‘what they need or want’, to reasonably tailor their services to meet those requirements. 

As customers ourselves, we ‘enjoy’ elements of personalisation in the services that we receive, whether that’s through Tesco’s club card scheme, personalised recommendations based on previous purchases from Amazon or being able to like companies on Facebook which push news to us in our activity streams. We are getting used to this type of service and the core enabler behind this is customer intelligence. It’s also known as customer insight and customer knowledge.

We are living in the Information Age according to the academics. We've gotten data rich because of the web, we even contribute to it by generating content  even to the point that we have to mine our data to make sense of it (a future post). We now have the tools to learn more about our customers but so do our peers or competitors. If we fail to understand to what our customers need or want, they will go to somebody that does. (check out my post on how all of us are making the web better)

This applies to the social housing sector as well. On the face of it, demand for social housing exceeds supply, which limits customer choice but tenants aren't the only customers. Stakeholders like the Homes and Communities Agency and the Banks are also our customers, we need to demonstrate that we are delivering good tailored services to our tenants to engage these stakeholders trust and confidence.  What’s at stake? Well a simplistic answer is organisational growth.  Reduced backing from these bodies would result in insufficient resources for developments and stock transfers. (Check out my posts on what social housing is and a brief history of social housing to find out more about the sector).

What is customer intelligence?

Customer intelligence is the process of using relevant information to develop a better understanding of customer preferences, beliefs and aspirations to enable the design and delivery of better and more personalised products and services.

Customer intelligence can help organisations to:

• Streamline its processes for delivering their products and services based on a better understanding of customer beliefs and expectations.
• Identify their priorities to enable the easier allocation of resources
• Develop better tailored products and services based on the customers requirements.
• Improve customer service levels and increase satisfaction rates

Above all else customer intelligence should be used by organisations to inform their strategic planning and should be used as tool in the decision making process.

Two pitfalls lot of organisations fall into, include treating the customer intelligence process as just data collation exercise, forgetting that data needs to be developed into useable knowledge for the organisation. Customer intelligence isn’t about collecting data, it’s about what you intend to do with it. The other thing organisations need to watch out for is treating the customer intelligence as a one off process; it’s a continuous activity which helps organisations to grow its knowledge of its customers. Remember, customer needs and preferences change, customers change for that matter (IDEA, 2009).

Creating Intelligence

The process of developing customer intelligence, in my opinion is linked to knowledge development within organisations. Customer intelligence begins life as unstructured raw data gathered through consultations, surveys and a variety of other methods. The data is contextualised and organised in relation to the organisations targets or key performance indicators to organise it into facts and figures to convert it make it useable information. Knowledge is created when the information and is considered & analysed in relation to the organisations ethos and goals. Previous experiences are applied to the information by the organisation to reflect and improve itself and this is the stage where simple information becomes organisational knowledge.

The following diagram outlines this process:

The process of converting data into information and transforming information into organisational knowledge

This is the end of part 1, in the next instalment, I will propose a few questions that organisations should ask themselves when they are developing their customer intelligence. I will also outline the key elements to consider when developing customer intelligence.  See you next time!

References

IDEA, 2009. What is customer or citizen insight? [online] Available at: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14380936> [cited 30 October 2011].

How all of us are changing the web: Part 2

In my digibored post 'How all of us are changing the web: Part 1', I talked about User Generated Content (UGC) and Crowdsourcing and how we have used them to change the web as we know it today. This is a follow up; I’ve picked out a few common ways that we use UGC and crowdsourcing. There are plenty of others, but for digibored I only need a few to highlight my points. If you want a fuller list, wiki the terms.

1. Ratings and Reviews - UGC
2. Tagging Stuff - UGC
3. Citizen Science - Crowdsourcing
4. Citizen Media - Crowdsourcing

Ratings and Reviews

This is probably one of the most common forms of UGC. A lot of us shop online (figure here). I know personally, every time I make a purchase on Amazon or Ebay, I’m prompted to rate and review what I’ve bought. I know I often check user ratings because it’s damn confusing with the sheer number of similar products on offer. And it’s just not shopping when I use my local public library service, reserving books online, again I have the option to rate and review my loans. So what we think of our purchases are a vital resource in the online marketplace.

For example, a study by Comscore revealed that online user-generated reviews influence one in four of us when we are purchasing a product or service online (2007). That makes our ratings, our reviews very influential, in fact Williams & Co. add to this saying that:

1. “Research has shown that many people trust other people’s reviews more than they trust expert opinion”

2. “There is a strong relation between positive reviews of a product or service and satisfaction with sales” (2010, p118).

Tagging Stuff

Have you ever tagged something online? No, are you sure?

What about tagging people in one of your pictures on Facebook? Or how about retweeting posts and adding hashtags to entries, on Twitter? If you have done, then, you’ve generated content online.  

We can assign keywords to various content, whether that’s a document on a intranet, a blog, a picture or a video that we’ve uploaded. This started off as a metadata tagging where we could choose a preset word in an online database to describe an item to help it be found again when we search for it. It’s evolved into folksonomy, where we can tag something with our own words which is what we tend to on platforms like Flickr and YouTube (Vander Wal, 2007).

Point is that tagging helps us to find things easier online and in the case of twitter and other social networking sites, it allows us to recycle and reshare content (Huang et al., 2010).

Citizen Science

What is it about the worked ‘citizen’ it just makes me think of worker ants…

Talking of worker ants, the science research sector has successfully tapped into crowdsourcing to help create citizen science. We all get a chance to be scientists finally; putting to use that home lab kit you got as a present from your mum or dad when you were nine. Well, you get to use for something other than blowing up your bedroom …Sorry Mum…  

Anyway back to the topic, ‘Citizen Science’ is about the average person helping with research on a range of scientific subjects. For example, in some companies are using services Innocentive to place scientific challenges to an open audience and awarding a prize fee for the best solutions. We can also contribute by sharing our spare computing power to help create a free online open-source lab for researchers for things like cancer research etc. by downloading World Community Grid Software (Howe, 2006; The Marketer, 2011).

      Citizen Journalism

There’s that ‘citizen’ word again. This time it’s being used by the media. ‘Citizen Journalism’ has become an extremely popular and vital resource in today’s day and age. It lets us report events as they happen. Essentially, citizen journalism involves “a wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute information or commentary about news events” (Educause, 2007).
     

Citizen journalism is used by major news providers like the BBC and CNN, as well as amateur news sites such as Cyber Journalist as well as blogs and video sharing sites. In fact Twitter posts are the main source of information via the Google real-time service (Educause, 2007, Google, N.D.).

Richard Sambrook, a BBC journalist summed up the benefit of citizen journalism in 2009 saying that “when major events occur, the public can offer us as much new information as we are able to broadcast to them. From now on, news coverage is a partnership”

Lets sum up

I’ve told you four ways that I think have helped us all to change the web, its nots a complete list, its not meant to be. In fact UGC and crowdsourcing aren’t the only ways that we are making web better, but like I said in my last digibored post there are two drivers. There are not perfect, in fact they have a few flaws i.e.  citizen journalism has been criticised for accuracy. The stories posted on  the CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport site “are not edited, fact checked or screened before they are posted” Despite their flaws, UGC and crowdsourcing are helping us to improve the web and its us using our ability to create content online that is helping to change the web. 


Hey, if you wanna read more about crowdsourcing, check out 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky. A lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University recomended it to me and it really got me into this subject.

Next post -  I'm switching pace and topics with my next digibored post... see you next time!

References

CNN, n.d. CNN iReport. [online] Available at: <http://ireport.cnn.com/> [Accessed 15 February 2011].

COMSCORE, 2007. Online Consumer-Generated Reviews Have Significant Impact on Offline Purchase Behaviour. [online] Available at: <http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2007/11/Online_Consumer_Reviews_Impact_Offline_Purchasing_Behavior> [Accessed 21 February 2011].

EDUCAUSE, 2007. 7 things you should know about citizen journalism. [online] Educause. Available at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7031.pdf [Accessed 23 February 2011].

Google, n.d. See what's new for Realtime Search.[online] Available at:  <http://www.google.com/landing/realtime/> [Accessed 24 February 2011].

HOWE, J., 2006b. The Rise of Crowdsourcing, wired magazine. [online] Available at:  <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html> [Accessed 21 February 2011].

HUANG, J., THORNTON, K.M. and Efthimiadis, E.N., 2010. Conversational Tagging in Twitter, HT’10, pp13–16, [online] Available at: http://jeffhuang.com/Final_TwitterTagging_HT10.pdf [Accessed 1 March 2011].

SAMBROOK, R., 2009. Citizen Journalism and the BBC, [online] Available at: <http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100542> [Accessed 25 February 2011].

How all of us are changing the web: Part 1

As a 'digibored' person and an all round slow adopter, the fact that my presence on the web helps to develop it, hasn't completely escaped me. Sure I'm a little late to the party but I’m still contributing to the web by creating user generated content, in fact lots of us are!

Like it or not, we are a hot commodity, there's plenty of organisations and institutions that have clocked the impact users like us have on the web. And they are asking for our help to develop their businesses in a variety of ways.  So this week, I’m going to talk about how all of us are helping to change the web by creating user generated content and how companies are harnessing that change through crowdsourcing.  

Where do i begin?

Let’s start at looking at the web and what we could or couldn't do until recently. When I started surfing I was in the world of Web 1.0 it was a view only web, where information was pushed to users by a small number of content creators/experts. It was like jumping on a bus, where for the most part you let the driver tell you where you were going.  

Then shiny Web 2.0 came along, being driven by us. It’s enabled us to collaborate with one another other and make contributions to it. Services on this web are now our platform, with the likes Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube encouraging us to create, recreate, mashup and share content. If user contribution and collaboration have made web 2.0 a possibility, User Generated Content and Crowdsourcing can be considered amongst its drivers (O'Reilly, 2005). (I'm not going to mention Web 3.0, I don't think we're there yet, we'll talk about it in another digibored post).

What’s User Generated Content (UGC)?

OECD defines UGC as “content made publicly available over the Internet, which reflects a certain amount of creative effort and which is created outside of professional routines and practices” (2007, p.4).

Clay Shirky (2010) reckons that we are changing the way we spend our free time, replacing passive participation in front of a TV by actively participating, creating content on the Internet. This cultural shift has increased our personal ambitions to express ourselves in a way TV cannot offer. So as a result, we are creating user generated content. Its not a new concept, people have created UGC pre-internet i.e. writing for the Newspaper reader sections and producing programming on public access channels on American cable television.

However on the ‘collaborative’ web, UGC has exploded, helped along by Technological, Social, Economic and Legal factors. Technological developments include faster online access, accessible software tools and an increase in UGC hosting websites have contributed to increase participation i.e. Blogger, YouTube etc. Social attitudes have also changed with the emergence of the ‘digital natives’ who have grown up with the Internet (Shirky, 2010; OECD, 2007).

Lower costs associated with UGC have helped to create new business models i.e. Threadless.com. Flexible approaches to copyright i.e. Creative Common licenses have also allowed easier adaptation and distribution of UGC (Howe, 2008; OECD, 2007).

So what’s crowdsourcing then?

Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 article for Wired magazine. He says that’s crowdsourcing “represents the act of a company or institution once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call…” (2006). 

He says that “Crowd-sourcing isn’t synonymous with user-generated content, but it often involves building a business around it” (2008, p.177). In essence, UGC refers to content created by users independently whereas crowdsourcing involves companies persuading the crowd to perform tasks traditionally done by employees.

So this was a look, albeit a brief one at UGC and Crowdsourcing, I’m aware that I’ve thrown a lot of definitions at you. There will be a part two to this blog entry, where I’ll outline four ways UGC and crowdsourcing have enhanced the way that we use the web.

References

HOWE, J., 2006, Crowdsourcing: A Definition. Crowdsourcing, [Blog] Available at:   <http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html> [Accessed 9 October 2011].

HOWE, J., 2008. Crowdsourcing, How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. London: Random House.

OECD, 2007. Participative Web: User-Created Content. [online] OECD. Available at: <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/57/14/38393115.pdf> [Accessed 10 October 2011].

O'Reilly, T., 2005, What is Web 2.0, [online] O'REILLY.COM. Available at: <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html> [Accessed 10 October 2011].

SHIRKY, C., 2010. Cognitive Surplus, Creativity and Genorisity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin.

Social Housing 2.0

Earlier this year the Chartered Institute of Housing ran a competition asking the question:

"How do we tackle the problem that the word ‘social’ is good when followed by ‘networking’ and bad when followed by ‘housing’?"

 The competition came and went and working in the social housing sector myself, it got me thinking, how can we use social media to improve the perceptions of social housing, so here's my 'entry' on digibored if you will, have a read and let me know what you think:

"Enter Social Housing 2.0: How we can use the power of our crowd to change perceptions of social housing"

‘Social networking’, is the current buzzword and as housing professionals we are getting LinkedIn in the sector with Facebook and Twitter impacting our personal lives. The genius behind social networking is that it places the ability to communicate easily at our fingertips. 

‘Social housing’, at its core is about offering affordable housing to vulnerable and economically disadvantaged people. Almost a fifth of people in England live in ‘social housing’. However this term brings up connotations of high-rises and run down areas and well it’s all ‘council housing’ innit to ‘Joe Bloggs’.  

To change perceptions we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions. Firstly, how ‘social’ is social housing? Well we may not always knock on a tenant’s door for a cuppa, but we do let tenants into ‘our house’, could you as a mortgage holder consult on your lenders governance and their service standards? Our tenants can. We work within our local communities, supporting local resident groups, promoting financial inclusion and reduce worklessness to build sustainable neighbourhoods, impacting whole communities not just our tenants.

Secondly, how networked are we? Do we talk to the right people in the right way at the right time?  The answer is no, despite being good communicators; we predominately just talk to our tenants and each other. Mr Jones at number 42 may ‘get us’ but we don’t really chat with Mr. Bloggs outside of our social housing universe.

So how do we change perceptions? The first step is acceptance, we need to accept that the term ‘social housing’ carries a negative perception and it’s time to refresh the concept, its time to rebrand… enter ‘Social Housing 2.0’. The second step is trust; trust in the power of our crowd which is a fifth of households in England.

Our tenants are our most enthusiastic advocates but on the whole, most of us are not providing the means to communicate their experiences and pride of being social housing tenants. Social networking places the world at people’s fingertips, but our sector isn’t taking advantage of these tools. We have been slow to introduce online services, and to adopt social networking, these services are seen as peripheral in most housing organisations.

We need to trust in our crowd to change perceptions by giving them a better voice to communicate the good and bad aspects of social housing. This is a courageous step for the sector but let’s seriously look at providing services at our customer’s fingertips to enable them to openly critique us. I don’t know if the term ‘Social Housing 2.0’ will be viewed as positive or negative but it will be powered by the honest view of our crowd and that’s how perceptions will change".

Well there you go, this is my entry, there's many way to lift perceptions of social housing, some people argue that we should follow more traditional media streams by developing better press links or launch television stations for social housing tenants. This is something I plan to explore in a future blog. I mentioned crowdsourcing in my 'entry' several times, so I’ll be talking about crowdsourcing as well as User Generated Content later this week. Thanks for reading...

What is digibored?

Surely its just a spelling mistake, you might think, he meant to write ‘digiboard’ or maybe digiboard, digi-board, digi_board were already taken or that I’m just trying to be cute. Actually you’re probably right on all three accounts but I have to confess I really am digibored, I’ve suffered from digital/technology boredom from day dot. 


Don’t get me wrong I love technology, I love digital media but I hate the technological jargon that goes with these things. I use technology in my day to day work and life, in my own words I do some pretty innovative stuff with it but I simply want technology that I can pick up and play. I want clear to use guidance, I don't want to read jargon, well unless i'm having trouble sleeping. Hey, I'm a slow adopter (Don’t tell anyone at work), I get confused over the simplest things sometimes, for example do I trend #digibored or @digibored on Twitter? (By the way I’m @showtime6677 if you wanna follow me). I know I’m not the only one who is digibored, there are a fair few of us, so I’m planning on using this blog to demystify some concepts and to also talk about my passion of continuously improving and developing organisations. 

Anyway my 1^st ‘proper’ post called ‘social housing 2.0’ is winging its way to you on Monday.