What Is Customer Science?

This week I've been putting together a presentation to introduce Customer Science and why I think it's now come of age thanks to Cloud CRM data-marts.

At one time, marketers like me really struggled to build a rich understanding of the customers in their target markets.  The first major challenge was to get customer data into a usable form.  With so many business systems designed to support a specific process or discipline, it's not uncommon for data to be held in many different back-office systems.  The Web made this situation even worse.  Even when marketers could get their customer database onto a spreadsheet (and you were lucky if it didn't blow up when attempting this due to the files sizes), data quality and inconsistency issues meant that marketers faced hours if not days of data crunching to get their data consistent.

In today's digital world a great deal has changed.  For one thing, the state of markets changes so quickly.  It would be a nonsence to try to attempt this type of 'single view' when customers ebb and flow on eCommerce websites on an hourly basis.  Another issue with digital customers is they don't interact using phones and face-to-face visits.  They don't want suppliers to call them out of the blue to ask them a hundred questions about their product interests, buying preferences, future plans or buying behavior.  We live in an era of event-driven, remote - practically always - online thoughtful consumers and buyers.  They're always on the look-out for a good deal, positive product or service recommendations, happy to snack online in pursuit of their purchasing interests - it's a very different world to the one Micheal Porter described in his marketing 'how to' articles.

In this presentation I've put down my thoughts on Customer Science and how it's rapidly maturing as a discipline.  I find the subject fascinating because, like many marketers, I share a huge interest in the fit between customer value and shareholder value.  I also have a belief that most customers are willing to buy your product or service if it addresses an unmet need - IF ONLY you can communicate to them in a fine-grained, relevant way.

I hope you enjoy this article.  Do let me have your feedback!

Ian.

What Is Customer Science - And Why Should You Care?