Customize for Your Customers

Now that we’ve got our simple (but robust) definition of “customer intelligence (CI),” let’s look at some examples to help flesh it out:
Example 1: “The Old Corner Grocer”
Our parents (or grandparents) remember the days of the old corner grocer: a friendly establishment where the owner knew all his patrons by name, remembered their preferences, listened to what his customers wanted, and continuously changed his business in ways that reflected their changing needs.

If the grocer knew that Mrs. Jones was an excellent customer who shopped at his store three times a week and loved Kalamata olives, he might make it a special point to order them and then let Mrs. Jones know that he had done so the next time he sees her in his shop. Or, if he knows Mrs. Jones and several other excellent customers have expressed a preference for shopping later on Thursdays and Fridays, he might decide to keep his store open just a little bit later on those days to accommodate them.

This example is a good one because it shows the integrated nature of CI in a simple way: the grocer isn’t just targeting Mrs. Jones with a particular kind of ad circular just because he knows something about her spending levels, he is recognizing that she is an excellent customer and not only communicating with her differently (in a very personalized and immediate way), but changing his in-store stock or store hours to meet her preferences and the preferences of valuable customers like her. CI in this example spans traditional database marketing (customizing communications to fit customer profiles), operations, customer service, and product development, and shows that CI is about more than just popping a targeted letter in the mail, it’s about listening to your customers and changing broad business practices to stay relevant to their needs.
Example 2: “We’re the Phone Company”
In the classic Saturday Night Live skit, Lily Tomlin as Ernestine introduces us to the phone company as a huge, uncaring, monolithic enterprise that couldn’t possibly care less about their customers: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.” This is obviously an excellent example of how NOT to have CI: deliver products and services that don’t necessary meet your customers’ needs, don’t communicate with them unless you absolutely have to, certainly don’t tailor the way you do business to your customers’ preferences, and by all means please don’t listen to your customers!

It’s a great example of how NOT having CI also impacts every area of a business; product and service development can occur in a vacuum without customer feedback, marketing can be entirely one-sided (a “push” model touting everything the company has to offer), there is no customer service to speak of, and the functional areas of the business are united not by a common focus on and desire to serve the customer, but by a universal indifference to customer needs. The non-CI company is focused inward, driven by what it can offer rather than what a customer might need (compare Henry Ford’s famous dictum, “The customer can have any color he wants as long as it’s black”), and is doomed to eventual irrelevance.
There are obviously lessons in both of these examples for any company that is serious about serving its customers well. In my next post, I’ll draw out these lessons by distilling six important characteristics of Customer Intelligence.