I’m excited to announce that our new research on how firms use customer analytics was just published today.  The new research reveals some interesting findings:

• Customer analytics serves the customer lifecycle , but measurement is restricted to marketing activities. While customer analytics continues to drive acquisition and retention goals, firms continue to measure success of customer analytics using easy-to-track marketing metrics as opposed to deeper profitability or engagement measures.

• Finding the right analytics talent remains challenging . It’s not the just the data. It’s not the just technology that hinders analytics success.  It’s the analytical skills required to use the data in creative ways, ask the right questions of the data, and use technology as a key enabler to advance sophistication in analytics.  We’ve talked about how customer intelligence (CI) professionals need a new breed of marketing scientist to elevate the consumption of customer analytics.

• CI professionals are keen to use predictive analytics in customer-focused applications,  Forty percent of respondents to our Global Customer Analytics Adoption Survey  tell us that they have been using predictive analytics for less than three years, while more than 70% of respondents have been using descriptive analytics and BI-type reporting for more than 10 years. CI professionals have not yet fully leveraged the strengths of predictive analytics customer applications.

As a product strategist, do you struggle with a sluggish innovation “process” in your firm? Do you think it takes too long to identify great ideas and turn those ideas into compelling new products and services for your customers? If you’re like most of your peers, the answer to both questions is probably a resounding "yes." That is exactly why Forrester’s Consumer Product Strategy practice developed The Open Innovation (OI) Playbook. 

Forrester defines open innovation as:

The act of innovating, whereby new ideas or methods are requested from three broad participant groups: employees, partners, and customers.

This approach to innovation is in stark contrast to the typically closed and often secretive product innovation practices that most firms still use today. Our OI playbook provides you with an end-to-end framework, organized in twelve easy-to-find modules, and designed to give you the insight, tools, and best practices that you need to successfully adopt an open innovation approach within your organization.

To get started, I suggest reading the Executive Overview: “Revolutionize Products And Services Through Open Innovation”.  This report will set the stage at a high level for you. Then, depending on where you are in your open innovation journey, you can “pick your spots” by navigating directly to the most applicable chapter for your needs. In general, the OI playbook is divided in to four phases as follows:

We've spent a lot of time in the past year looking at how the customer intelligence services landscape is changing. For one thing, it's a heck of a lot more chaotic: everyone from management consultants to systems integrators to KPO vendors is putting a stake in the ground of CI services. We've also seen a dramatic shift in the way some digital & direct agencies and database MSPs are thinking about their most strategic client relationships. This change has been so noticeable that, a few months ago, we actually published research that defines a new business model: The Customer Engagement Agency (CEA). 

It's no surprise that clients and vendors alike are excited about this model. These agencies help elevate customer intelligence within the client organization. They bring attention and focus to the importance of customer knowledge, and they work hard at infusing that knowledge throughout every customer touchpoint. They measure customer value, not just marketing campaigns. And they help clients use CI to answer questions about everything from product development to logistics and resource management. 

But, this is an emerging market — the players are evolving from very different backgrounds; they offer substantially different "value-added" capabilities; and many of them have proprietary methods and models that make it hard to compare apples to apples. 

That's why we've just kicked off a Customer Engagement Agency Wave^TM that will publish in the fall. If you're intrigued with the idea of working with a CEA, I encourage you to:

Marketers and CI professionals frequently tell us that they want a better measurement technique to accurately determine the true performance of channels and customers. I am pleased to announce that today we published The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Attribution Providers, Q2 2012.  This vendor review is a result of countless hours of vendor reviews and assessments, in-person briefing reviews, customer calls, fact checking, and countless hours of intensive research work.

• Companies are investing in attribution. Marketers are seeking expert advice for the best ways to measure their channels with more precision. Attribution approach can provide a more concise way of measuring true channel and customer performance. And that’s something organizations are hungry for. To do this, they need help developing attribution models and making sense of all their data.
• Cross- channel attribution is a relatively immature market. Vendors have fairly immature cross-channel attribution offerings. Most continue to emphasize digital attribution but are rapidly expanding to include additional channels, while also developing future marketing scenario-planning capabilities.