Buy analytics software, hire marketing scientists, and engage analytics consultants. Now wait for the magic of customer analytics to happen. Right?

Wrong. Building a successful customer analytics capability involves careful orchestration of several capabilities and requires customer insights (CI) professionals to answer some key questions about their current state of customer analytics:

  • What is the level of importance given to customer analytics in your organization?  
  • Have you clearly defined where you will use the output of customer analytics?
  • How is your analytics team structured and supported?
  • How do you manage and process your customer data?
  • Do you have clear line of sight between analytics efforts and business outcomes?
  • What is the process of sharing insights from analytics projects?
  • What type of technology do you need to produce, consume and activate analytics?

To help you understand where you are in your customer analytics journey, Forrester has developed a self-assessment tool to score analytics capabilities across six dimensions: strategy, organization, data, technology, process, and analytics and measurement.  The results of the assessment will outline your analytics persona and determine whether you are an analytics rookie, a dabbler, a pro or a guru. Our latest report “It’s Time To Raise The Bar With Analytics”, which is a part of the Customer Analytics playbook, provides an interactive tool to determine your analytics persona and describes the characteristics of each persona in detail.

I encourage customer insights (CI) professionals to take the assessment and get a grasp of analytics strengths and weaknesses and more importantly identify opportunities for future investments. Look forward to discussing your results!