Chapter 8

Customer Analytics

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”

William Thomson, a.k.a. Lord Kelvin (1824–1907)

“In North Wales, from where I come, we measure a man from the chin up.”

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1863–1945)

Chapter 3 discussed a process for customer engagement that included organizational sensing, understanding customers individually, interpreting this understanding and responding to each customer. This chapter focuses principally on the two cornerstones for engaging with customers and developing enduring relationships: understanding each customer and interpreting this understanding into solutions that customers value. Collectively, these cornerstones are called customer analytics and may be defined more generally as the processes by which companies use data and analysis to optimize customer engagement. To achieve this end, organizations do the following with a view to informing the development of customer-specific strategies, tactics and other factors that affect and advance relationships with customers:

  • Sense customers' behaviors
  • Learn from this sensing
  • Frame questions, objectives or hypotheses
  • Inform questions, hypotheses or potential strategies and tactics to the extent data permit the required analysis, predictions and optimizations
  • Interpret their considerations into experiments or solutions using customer-specific knowledge
  • Implement solutions or experiments, and
  • Measure implementation outcomes and understand transaction and ...

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