In modern business environments, an understanding of customer context is critical to attracting new customers, and retaining and enhancing service for existing customers. In many markets, there are few barriers to customer movement between suppliers of similar goods and services, allowing customers the freedom to change suppliers on demand.

Customer mobility represents a constant challenge for businesses to ensure that existing customers are retained, and that new customers are attracted both into the market and away from competitors. In positive economic climates, an understanding of which customers are the most likely to move to competitors, and the factors which motivate these decisions is a critical tool for commercial organizations in growing business. In adverse economic environments, such insights are crucial to maintaining revenue streams and market share.

Bringing Data Together

Customer intelligence can be derived from many different sources in the business environment. Example sources may include:

• Call centre interactions — Telephony system inputs such as call times, lengths, IVR actions, tone/sentiment analysis across a wide range of sales, support, accounts and complaints environments
• Online environments — Pre-customer and customer portal inputs such as session times, content analysis, logins, usage patterns, and pre- and post-destination analysis
• Accounts interactions — Billing intervals, payment intervals, accounts incidents, trends, internal and external credit ratings, customer payment histories, overall customer value and relationships between customers and accounts
• Service utilization history — Origin, usage patterns, trends, and qualification and uptake for special offers
• Product performance — Product availability, reliability, and life cycles
• Demographic data — Internal and external market surveys, socio-economic and location-based trends
• Competitor analysis — Active campaigns, alignment between product offerings, and price comparisons.

The key challenge in managing customer experience and delivering customer intelligence is the ability to bring together multiple sets of data from disparate sources. This may include traversing both IT systems and organizational boundaries. Across all these types of data sources and regardless of origin, real-time analysis, correlation and projection is required, together with ease of access.

Adding further to the challenge of data integration, customer intelligence solutions must deliver business value and benefits immediately as well as over longer time horizons, and provide opportunities for incremental enhancements in response to rapidly changing business environments.

In modern business environments, there are myriad channels by which customers interact with suppliers. Delivering operational intelligence to business divisions such as marketing, internal sales, customer support, or accounts requires an aggregation of empirical data across channels so that a customer’s (or potential customer’s) entire context can be better understood prior to engagement.

Applications of customer intelligence in the business environment can identify:

• Customer churn potential
• Customer cross-sell and up-sell potential
• Qualification for special offers
• Self selection for targeted marketing and ‘right sizing’
• Affected customers for service management

Event Zero not only provides access to disparate customer information, but provides it in real time for instant analysis. Also, unlike many data warehousing solutions, Event Zero offers lightweight integration with external applications.

Event Zero’s Event Processing Network platform is the ideal foundation for customer experience management and intelligence applications. The EPN provides industry-leading capability to rapidly and reliably source component data from a wide range of data sources in real time, together with advanced business logic and rules-processing capability to support correlation and analysis between and across individual data input streams.

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