Access and Feeds

Collaboration: Businesses Struggle to Build a Consolidated View of their Customers

By Dick Weisinger

Goal number one at a majority of companies is  to increase revenues.  And many believe that the best way to grow revenues is to focus on the needs of existing and potential customers.  But a survey by Coveo, conducted by Forrester, found that while many businesses try to adopt strategies that focus on customer needs, their efforts are often stymied because customer data doesn’t flow uniformly across the business.  Sales and marketing, customer service, and engineering aren’t always working off of the same data about their customer.  And that’s a problem.

63 percent of companies think that the best way to increase revenues is to focus on their customer

69 percent of companies say that problems with collaboration and information sharing within their organization is what’s blocking them from understanding and responding to their customers.  Interestingly, many of these businesses have attempted to solve the problem by adopting social media tools and collaboration platforms.

42 percent of companies say that less than a quarter of information available about a customer is available consistently through all groups within the company

65 percent of customer support groups within companies do not combine the information they glean from social media about their customers with data about those same customers that’s available through in their enterprise applications

Kate Leggett, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that “Although 78 percent of customer intelligence professionals understand the value of social media data, far fewer are able to transform it into customer insight that drives better company strategy.”
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