Here, we are continuing our series of articles on the roles and responsibilities that are needed to transform companies into flexible organizations that focus outwardly on the customer. Our focus this week: the VP of Customer Information and the distributed, cross-functional team of customer information specialists that you should have embedded in your various departments: Sales, Marketing, R&D, etc.
More than just the person in charge of customer intelligence, this high-ranking executive, who should report directly to the SVP of Customer Experience, needs to be responsible for the stewardship of the information that matters most to your customers, as well as the information about your customers.
Despite the amount of information that many customers are willing to share, most organizations still have a long way to go in pulling together actionable information that can be used to enhance their customers’ experiences and to improve customer profitability. This critical role should be responsible for gathering, understanding, analyzing, protecting, and making accessible all customer information in order to give customers access to the information they care about in the ways they want to organize and use it and to consolidate and analyze the information that you need in order to better serve customers and to better market to customers and prospects.
Key Roles for Managing Customer Information
Designing Your Customer-Centric Organization
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, August 25, 2011
