The deluge of customer data shows no signs of abating. The perpetually-connected customer leaves data footprints in every interaction with a brand. This presents tremendous opportunities for customer insights professionals and analytics practitioners tasked with analyzing this data, to not only get smarter about customers but ensure that the insights get appropriately used at the point of customer interaction.

When we asked customer analytics users about the challenges and drivers of customer analytics adoption, we found that data integration and data quality continue to inhibit better adoption of customer analytics while users still want to use analytics to improve the data-driven focus of the organization and drive satisfaction and customer retention.

 

Forrester’s Customer Analytics Playbook guides customer insights professionals, marketing scientists and customer analytics practitioners into this new reality of customer data and helps discover analytics opportunities, plan for greater sophistication, take steps towards building a customer analytics capability and continually monitor progress of analytics initiatives. It will include 12 chapters (and an executive overview) that cover different aspects of customer analytics.

·   Discover. These reports will help customer insights professionals understand how analytics drives customer life-cycle management, highlight trends in the customer analytics landscape and build the business case to justify customer analytics investments.

·   Plan. These reports will help customer insights professionals assess the maturity of customer analytics efforts. They will also help outline steps to progress towards customer analytics sophistication and lay out a roadmap to create an advanced customer analytics capability.

·   Act.These reports will help in implementing the necessary organization structure and analytics processes to excel at customer analytics. It will also guide customer insights professionals through a myriad of choices in the customer technology and services ecosystem.

·   Optimize.These reports will help continually monitor your progress towards building a customer analytics capability by providing benchmarks, metrics and advanced analytics techniques.  

We suggest starting with the executive overview ‘Customer Analytics Turns Data Into Intelligence ’ to get a sense of key areas that the playbook will cover. We have plenty of more customer analytics research in the hopper and look forward to feedback and inputs into our research. Feel free to reach out through inquiries, briefings or directly @Srividya.