What Roadblocks Are Blocking Your View of Customer Intelligence?

At my company’s second Customer Intelligence Gathering (CIG) on Tuesday June 8, we discussed a number of issues that impede the spread of Customer Intelligence throughout an organization.

Some of the roadblocks to be aware of are:

“Magic Bullet” syndrome

Most software vendors would like to sell you a “magic bullet": a single solution for all of your Customer Intelligence needs. And on the buyer/client side, most organizations are all too willing to be wooed by the pitch: it’s just so enticing to believe that all you need do is buy and install a piece of software and POOF! . . . you’ve got a solution that your marketing and finance folks love, all your customer data are in one place, the sales force has the tool they need to break all records (you get the idea). Best to put away the Polyjuice Potion and remind yourself that no wand from Ollivander’s will help here: no “magic bullet” exists, it’s just a sales pitch.

Business Process Blind Alley

There’s often no accepted business process in place to accomodate a new piece of software that’s been installed to address a Customer Intelligence need; often there’s a broken process, or no process at all, in which case either, the process will be implied by the software functionality (the software tail will drive the business dog), or the software will be under-utilized because there’s no process to take advantage of it. Organizational alignment is necessary to get out of the “business process blind alley” and get agreement on exactly how any new toy – er, software – will be utilized and what business process it’s intended to enhance or replace.

Demonstrated Need Dilemma

Often large financial instutions, largely because of Sarbanes Oxley, are required to have organization-wide policies and procedures in place to cover all sorts of business functions. This leads them to seek “enterprise solutions” to problems, and often won’t solve a problem until it has a demonstrated enterprise-wide need. Since most problems are not of this scale, “point solutions” that attack small problems or are workarounds to larger problems, are implemented instead and fly under the radar of the enterprise police.

Many companies are caught in the dilemma: go big with enterprise-wide solutions (in which case you really need to make the case at the highest levels of management for a big budget and a long project, both tough sells in today’s environment) or stay small with point solutions targeting smaller, tractable problems, but risk developing a rat’s nest of solutions all across the organization with the resultant lack of coherence and organizational focus. It’s a tough one to solve, and each organization approaches the problem differently (sorry, no easy answers here!).

Selfish Sales Force

One participant told us of a problem she encountered working at a large list vendor. The sales force “owned” the customer database, and they wouldn’t let it be updated by anyone outside their ranks. So the data gradually grew dirty and stale as necessary data hygiene was put off and churn in the sales force meant that old records just stayed and decayed. No matter who “owns” the customer database, it must always be maintained to the highest standards of data hygiene, deduplication, and list maintenance – in spite of any protests to the contrary by jealous “owners” who don’t want “their” customers touched (it’s not just the sales force, either; any internal group can cause trouble by “owning” the customer database and then not living up to the responsibilities of ownership).

No Time

Let’s face it: even if there’s a customer database, and a suite of BI tools, and a CRM tool, and an MDM solution that ensures all data everywhere are managed and standardized, only a small fraction of people in the organzation may take advantage of the vast trove of precious data, because they just don’t have the time. Most folks accessing Customer Intelligence do so narrowly and in small doses, in response to a particular problem they are having, and not with an eye to a more holistic, organization-wide vision they might have of how to manage the entire customer relationship. They need to “get in, get out, and get on” with their jobs.

There are no easy solutions here and the problems run the gamut from technical to organizational to political. But keeping these potential roadblocks in mind will at least make you aware of what you’re up against and arm you as you work to create your own Customer Intelligent organization.