Written By: Vishesh Kumar
What’s behind the surge in customer intelligence platforms?
The global market for customer intelligence platforms is estimated to approach $8-14 billion by the end of the decade. North America is the largest market, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. The increasing emphasis businesses place on making irrefutable facts, metrics, and data the basis of their key decisions is an important factor behind the rapid adoption of customer intelligence platforms. Guesstimates and gut feelings are being shoved out the door for the right reasons when it comes to organizational decision making. Digitization and AI/ML technologies are making it easier to track customers’ activities, interactions and transactions as well as gather and analyze large volumes of personalized customer data. This, in turn, has spawned an industry of customer intelligence platforms capable of unifying data from multiple sources and then fishing out insights from it. The external and internal data sources covered by these platforms include customers’ personal and demographic data, purchase and interaction data, and social media conversations.
With plenty of sophisticated customer intelligence platforms around delivering customer-centric analytics, businesses feel encouraged to develop products and services closely mapping to the requirements of individual users and specific segments. The key objective is to deliver a positive customer experience consistently and deny customers reasons to jump ship! As a result, enterprises are more than willing to jack up their budgets for such platforms. There are customer intelligence platforms for every need and company size. Monthly subscriptions start from $45 through $3,000 to $25,000. Just who are the key players in this space? Let’s find out.
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Challenges of the customer intelligence platforms
Oracle Customer Intelligence Solution
The customer intelligence solution from the Austin, TX, tech behemoth delivers an integrated view of relevant customer data from multiple sources. This serves as a basis for providing personalized customer experiences, both online and in-store. Based on customers’ current and past buying behavior, the platform’s advanced analytics help businesses reckon the total net profit they can hope to earn from specific customers throughout the duration of their relationship with the business. Enterprises can then group customers based on their potential for repeat purchases and their overall contribution to company bottom lines. Furthermore, with such customer intelligence platforms, businesses can tailor marketing campaigns, configure products, and extend customer support with a laser focus on high-value customers.
IBM Predictive Customer Intelligence Solution
The IBM platform automates the gathering of customer data from myriad internal and external sources. The tool then proceeds to mine the data to develop a mathematical model that tells businesses how customers will likely behave in the future under specific circumstances. This allows marketing, sales, and customer support to recalibrate their efforts informed by quantitative data points (“hard metrics”). In the past, decision making has often been clouded by emotions, biases, and personal experiences. The metrics-based approach to choosing between alternatives is a welcome departure from the irrational practices of a bygone era. So, in this info-centric age, data is a powerful and versatile weapon, much like the lightsaber from the Star War series, sought after by businesses to hew a passage through the crowd of competing products and connect with valuable customers. Customer intelligence platforms like this one from the “Colossus of Armonk” represent a step in that direction by enabling data-driven decisions, leading to improved customer experiences.
Microsoft ACIS, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Tech titan Microsoft offers multiple customer intelligence platforms, including the Active Customer Intelligence Suite (ACIS) and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. ACIS gathers and examines a variety of customer information (e.g., age, gender, income levels) as well as metrics such as the time customers typically spend on specific products and aisles while in physical retail stores. Leveraging a combination of AI, ML, data mining, and big data analytics, ACIS extracts workable insights on customer activities, actions, expectations, likes, dislikes, and inclinations in relation to a certain brand. Thus, it pinpoints opportunities to fine-tune the brand in line with customer preferences. While the focus of ACIS is on in-store customer insights, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights provides metrics from across both physical stores as well as digital channels and touchpoints (e.g., websites, social media, email, mobile apps).
To discover how to apply the customer intelligence platforms into your businesses,
How can Infiniti Research help you with its solutions?
Our customer intelligence studies are configured to help business across sectors increase customer retention rates appreciably. Our experts serve as the client’s extended arm to roll out programs to alleviate customer pain points, buying pattern, feedback, perception, selection criteria, brand preference and much more. Our customer intelligence model delivers a “single version of truth” with respect to customer satisfaction levels. Besides, by analyzing historical and current data, the framework predicts with high accuracy the percentage of customer churn, changing brand preferences etc. We specialize in delivering deep-dive customer intelligence studies specific to B2B sectors helping them gain access to data that is not easily available.
Success Story, how we helped our client:
Buyer preferences in the B2B space have changed significantly in the last 4 years owing to macroeconomic changes due to Covid, war and inflation. Our customer intelligence solutions are helping clients fill this gap and position their products and solutions to meet the changing demands of customers. Be sure to benefit from our customer intelligence expertise, don’t miss out!
So, contact us now for a free consultation.
A European medical devices company gains deep-dive insights on buying patterns: Customer intelligence
Our client is a Central European medical devices company operating across Europe, North America and APAC regions. The client has a presence in over 30 countries, and develops equipment used by hospitals for diagnosis. This year our client marked its third decade in business, and over the last 4-6 years, the client has sustained revenue growth of around 6%.
The client has been actively launching new products and Infiniti has supported them with studies involving assessment of market size, potential, competitor benchmarking, market share assessment, go-to-market strategy etc. To go in alignment with the launch of new products, the client also wanted support on assessment of buying patterns and preferences of their main target segment which happens to be hospitals. We went about conducting detailed surveys with buying decision makers of the target segment across 10 different countries in Europe, North America and APAC regions. We went about identifying top prospects, assessment of the organization structure, mapping key decision makers, influencers etc., and conducting surveys with identified decision makers and influencers to understand buying preferences, brand awareness, acceptable price points, selection criteria etc., to develop detailed insights and recommendations to devise their customer acquisition strategy.
We also did an assessment of change in patterns and preferences between regions and countries so that they can align their messaging accordingly. We interviewed close to 30 participants per country to arrive at datapoints that are statistically significant and could provide meaningful insights.
In conclusion, the solutions offered by Infiniti Research helped the client with an optimized functioning and a much more effective customer acquisition journey.
