What is Customer Intelligence

What is Customer Intelligence?

Customer Intelligence also called client intelligence or account intelligence is the process of monitoring sales and risk signals in customer accounts or clients to:

• Discover new business or revenue opportunities
• Identify risks to prevent churn or losing customers
• Build an effective and deeper customer relationship

• Board
• Executives & Management Team  –  CEO, CMO, CRO, CFO, etc.,
• Sales teams
• Account Managers
• Client Partners
• Customer Intelligence & Client Intelligence
• Sales & Account Intelligence
• Customer Success Managers
• Revenue Operations
• Sales Operations
• Finance, etc.

Read how sales and customer success teams benefit from Intellizence’s Customer Intelligence:Click here.

Why is Customer Intelligence Important for Businesses?

The business environment is evolving rapidly. Multiple frequent changes are happening in customer organizations. Monitoring such changes is critical as various sales and risk signals could lead to new revenue generation opportunities or disrupt the existing customer engagements. 

Few such critical signals are:

The customer receives a new investment: 

A customer receiving new investment or funding is a sales signal. The customer would likely spend the money on new products & services. It’s high time to engage with the customer stakeholders, discover new investment areas, and pitch for the company’s products and services. 

Customer got acquired: 

Merger & Acquisition is a growth strategy for companies and happens all the time. If your customer is getting acquired, it’s a potential risk signal. Usually, there is uncertainty in the acquired company whenever there is an acquisition event –  changes in executives, decisions being on hold or delayed, restructuring, etc. Getting to know such M&A events timely is critical. So risk mitigation can be planned by building relationships with the acquiring company, etc.,

Customer acquired another company: 

It’s not uncommon that an acquiring company controls decisions about the acquired company’s strategy and rationalizes existing products and services. If your customer acquired another company, it’s an important sales signal as there could be opportunities to cross-sell or upsell your products or services.

Management changes in customer or client organizations:

Any C-Level or executive changes would have a cascading effect on the decision-making and buying process. A new CEO would typically do an organizational restructuring and plan different growth strategies to execute her/his plan. Such changes or restructuring in your customer or client organizations could lead to potential opportunities or risks. Executive sponsors in your customer organizations may get promoted or get an additional budget.  In such scenarios, timely engagement with them can lead to new revenue opportunities. Alternatively, they may be changed to different roles or move out of the organization. In such scenarios, identifying and building relationships with new stakeholders is critical. So having timely customer intelligence is very important.

What are the Data Sources for Customer Intelligence?

To build comprehensive customer intelligence, the information has to be sourced from multiple places – internal and external sources that can be in structured or unstructured formats. Some of the common sources are:

• News 
• Press Releases
• Regulatory Filings
• Company Websites
• Blogs
• Social Feed
• Customer Relationship Management ( CRM)
• Customer Success Management (CSM) platform, etc

What are the Challenges in Getting Timely & Relevant Customer Intelligence?

Following are some of the key challenges in getting timely and relevant customer intelligence:

• Information overload – In today’s digital era, finding information is not a problem. The real challenge is too much information is published at high velocity and scattered across multiple sources – internal and external. 
• Too many sources – Monitoring and analyzing multiple sources of information is not humanly scalable and is time-consuming.
• Curation of unstructured data – Filtering the right signals from noise is tedious and expensive.
• Delivering the relevant intelligence to each user – The relevance of customer intelligence for each user varies based on his/her business function and role. For example, CXOs are interested in knowing key signals like Merger & Acquisition ( M&A) across all the customers whereas Customer Success Managers or Account Managers, or Client Partners are interested to know only about customers or clients that they manage.

Intellizence – AI-Powered Customer Intelligence Platform

Companies should consider AI-powered customer intelligence platforms like Intellizence to get timely & relevant customer intelligence. Powered by Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, Intellizence monitors various external data sources and discovers growth & sales signals like M&A, Funding, and Management changes in customer organizations.  The signals are delivered through various channels of choice – email alerts, CRM, web applications, Slack, etc., Intellizence also offers APIs to integrate internal applications like the Customer Success Management (CSM) platform to build a comprehensive Customer 360 application.