Because marketing, sales, services and customer care connect brands directly to consumers, organisations now require deeper and broader knowledge of their customers than ever before. Unfortunately, recent studies° show that 96% of companies struggle with making effective use of customer data. However, organisations that do manage to create actionable customer insight outperform those which do not by more than 85% for customer experience management, resulting in a significantly better business performance.

° Customer Analytics: how to make best use of customer data, Aberdeen Group, July 2015

Together with our partner, CIM7 in The Netherlands, we wrote an introduction to Customer Insight Management. It’s a compact guide to most of the concepts and techniques you’ll find on our website. Get it here for free!

Customer insight is about knowing and understanding your customer up to a level that is relevant to you and the customer. In a Big Data era in which it is becoming easier to collect data, there are still a lot of companies that claim they have untold information about their business, but have to admit that they do not really understand what their customers want, why they want it and what they’ll want next!

That’s why we consider customer insight creation as a process of both creative thinking – that’s where the art comes in – and structured data processing – the science part, more specifically: data science. As such, customer insight is the result of not only looking back at the interaction with your market and your customers, but also, and more importantly, looking forward to predict what to expect and to prescribe what our next best action should be to improve our performance.