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Editor's Note
Real Customer Intelligence
There's an unplanned theme throughout this issue of Profit—how customers are making great strides in better managing their customer information. Although the main feature was always intended to highlight customer relationships, many of the other customers who talked to us—for our special sections on healthcare, financial services, and PeopleSoft—shared common tales about how they have used technology to solve the problems that arise when customer data is incomplete or duplicate.
Certainly it's efficient, productive, and cost-effective to coordinate customer information, either by combining everything into a single database or by using technology that lets you pull together information from many sources. But you were intelligent about your business long before you started using business intelligence software—you wouldn't have a business if you weren't doing something right. Has technology changed the way you make decisions?
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, talks about how people often second-guess their decision-making abilities—people in a test case he discusses would say that they hadn't made up their minds about something when their subconscious had demonstrably been affecting their behavior much earlier. Read the first third of Gladwell's book, and it seems like a testament to the importance of going with your instincts. But read on to the profile he includes of a car salesman, one of the most successful in his region, who relied on a subtle reading of each customer he approached but who also had rules about how he treated every customer, even if that person didn't look particularly prosperous or inclined to buy. He was successful because he knew when to use the information he'd gathered about a particular customer—and when to ignore it.
You can collect all the information in the world about your customers—everything they've bought from you, every call they've made to your customer service reps, and information from outside sources that tells you how people in their particular demographic behave. You can flood your organization with information, but how you decide to use that information will be the critical test of the value of the system, and many of those decisions need to be made before the data arrives on your desktop. Figure out how you're going to treat every customer, even those you don't think represent the most significant revenue opportunities. Look at the information you want to gather, and ask yourself how you'd want the same information treated if you were the customer (somewhere, you are). Consumers have expectations of privacy, security, and respect—and as products are increasingly becoming commodities, the company that best acknowledges those needs will obtain the competitive edge.
On another note, we've recently had the unpleasant task of bidding farewell to our magazine's founder, Julie Gibbs, who has left Oracle. Julie started Profit nine years ago and provided guidance and insight to our editorial team in every issue. We'll miss her passion, intelligence, and leadership, and we wish her great success in all of her future endeavors.
Margaret Terry Lindquist
margaret.lindquist@oracle.com
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