The Wikipedia definition of ‘Customer Insight’ is put simply as the “identification of customer needs”. Customer insight is now widely practiced in a bid to discover more about customers - their individual profiles and the commonalities between them. After all, the more information one knows about one’s customers, the more accurate the resulting campaigns and (usually) the better the ROI. Jed Mooney, managing director of Datahold explains more…
Up until recently customer insight was the sole domain of large companies and organisations. This was because customer insight demanded, and still does, that considerable volumes of data be sourced, consolidated, stored and made readily available for analysis. This takes considerable IT resources (software/hardware) and data management expertise.
Up until recently, only large organisations with economies of scale could afford to run dedicated data departments with sophisticated mainframe hardware, expensive bespoke software and hands-on data management by experienced professionals. This ‘high cost’ paradigm has now come to an end. There is no justification for high prices at all.
Why? Firstly, hardware and software prices have come down dramatically over the past few years whilst the actual technological capacity of the equipment has increased. Customer insight software can now be run on laptops, let alone mid-priced servers. Secondly, the IT expertise needed to manage customer insight has become far more accessible and cost effective.
Indeed, many SME’s are now creating their own customer insight programmes in-house. Others are moving their customer insight data management offshore because the level of service is higher and the costs low. Offshore provides 24/7 levels of service whilst the time differential is actually an advantage as data can be processed ‘overnight’. Moreover, staffing levels can be cost-effectively enhanced to provider greater reactivity and better service levels.
Why spend £40,000 on a data processing manager and further salary on support staff when, for a fraction of the cost, the data can still be kept in-house but accessed remotely via VPN links from a foreign country? More and more companies are looking into this combined strategy of keeping data in-house yet cost effectively outsourcing the work on it.
Whatever the route chosen, data management is no longer the domain of IT Departments guarding their own fiefdoms – it is now available at a remarkably competitive cost. Data has now become a commodity and whilst this may be bad news for some, it has made customer insight available to all. For UK marketing, that’s not a bad thing.
Source: DM Weekly
Publication Date: October 2007