What is Customer Intelligence?

Customer intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing information about a business's customers with the intent of identifying the best way of interacting with them, in order to strengthen relationships and increase loyalty. Data that makes up customer intelligence can come from many sources, including retail purchases and website behavior. When combined and analyzed, this data can help organizations make better decisions about customer segmentation and personalized offers to customers.

How contact centers can use customer intelligence

Contact centers are currently being challenged to provide differentiating customer experiences (CX). An effective way to do that is to use customer intelligence to personalize interactions. For example, customer intelligence can inform agents, through CRM applications, where the customer lives, what they have purchased in the past, and the details about past customer service interactions. This can enable the agent to ask how the customer is handling the current snowstorm, find out if their last issue was resolved to their satisfaction, and let them know that the company just started offering handbags that match the shoes the customer recently purchased.

Additionally, because customer intelligence enables better customer segmentation, companies can identify their most profitable customers. This allows contact centers to give them the VIP treatment by placing them at the front of the queue or routing them to a special agent team.

How contact centers generate customer intelligence

Because contact centers communicate with customers every day, they are a prime source of customer intelligence. Below are three examples of how contact centers contribute to customer insights.

• Interaction history: Contact centers collect and retain history about past customer contacts. This information can inform organizations about the nature of each customer's interactions, as well as their communication preferences.
• Survey results: Contact centers often administer surveys to find out if customers are satisfied with the service they received. Survey results are a valuable addition to customer intelligence.
• Interaction analysis: Contact centers that use interaction analytics software can analyze 100% of contacts from every channel. This allows them to determine customer sentiment, which is highly useful customer intelligence.