Roadmaps help our clients plan and prioritize programs that drive sustainable improvements in business performance through the generation and application of customer insight to the customer experience. Drawing on our strategic, analytic and technology expertise, we help clients understand what must change, why it's necessary and how to make it happen.

Customer Experience Strategy

The customer experience agenda is about how customers feel and say about doing business with you, what influences that, and how you can take steps to improve it in an imperfect world.

Companies who fail to make the customer experience a strategic priority are potentially not maximizing customer lifetime value, and worse, leaving their valuable customers open to 'poaching' by competitors.

The challenge is to be able to influence and manage both the physical and the emotional relationship your customers have with your company, in a more systematic way.

This involves examining both the quality of a company's execution and the efficacy of the result: aligning customer needs with the company's ability to fulfill those needs.

Business & Decision assists clients to formulate a strategy (aligned to customer and business objectives) for orchestrating experiences across touch points and channels in a way that enhances the customer's perceived value of the firm's offerings. We can also help to build the capabilities necessary for managing customer information and interactions which enables a company to efficiently sense and respond appropriately to customers.

Applying a coherent approach to the overall customer experience enables our clients to move customers up the loyalty ladder, and realize greater 'return on customer' (revenue from each customer relationship) and ultimately influence customer behavior (eg. repeat purchase, referral).

Great customer experiences can and should be designed and delivered as part of a conscious strategy. There are ways to achieve dramatic results. Business & Decision can help you do this and it's easier than you might think to make a start.

To learn more about Business & Decision's Customer Experience Strategies and Roadmaps, contact us at strategy@businessdecision.com.

Customer Insight & Analytics Strategy

In order to successfully acquire, develop and retain profitable customers, businesses must first develop the capability to generate customer and business insights. These insights form the basis of downstream decision-making and execution, which allows them to better understand their customers' needs and behavioral drivers. With this understanding, they can optimize their marketing, sales and service activities.

Business & Decision's Customer Insight & Analytics Strategy provides you with a structured approach to creating a roadmap for the design and implementation of the systems and processes that derive customer insights. We start by understanding your current ability to draw actionable insight from their customer data, factoring in your current data sources, infrastructure, processes and people capabilities.

Next, we help you identify business opportunities and gaps in your core information resources that can be addressed through integration, as well as augmentation with third-party data. In parallel with these efforts, Business & Decision identifies models and analytical processes that would leverage the integrated and augmented data.

From here we develop an actionable roadmap of initiatives, which lays out step-by-step the infrastructure, systems and processes required to deliver increased value through advanced modeling and analytics. We also help formulate the change management required to fully exploit these new capabilities.

By deepening your understanding of your customers, Business & Decision can help you drive more effective, better-targeted campaigns, boost customer loyalty, generate higher lifetime customer value, and improve the overall return on customer investment. In short, profitable, lasting customer relationships are built upon customer insight.

To learn more about Business & Decision's Customer Insight & Analytics Strategies and Roadmaps, contact us at strategy@businessdecision.com.

Customer Segmentation Strategy

When it comes to customer segmentation many organizations fall into two common traps. The first is considering all customers to be a single, homogenous group. Routinely, these companies develop a "one-size-fits-all" customer strategy that's irrelevant to a large portion of their customer base. Treating all customers the same often results in high churn, as customers flee to competitors whose offerings are better tailored to meet their needs.

The second mistake is attempting to be all things to all people. These companies will do whatever it takes to meet customer demands, even when those demands are unreasonable or unsound. Frequently, customers with the least value to the organization make the most audacious demands. However, some customers are highly valuable so it's in the company's best interest to meet their demands. Without a segmentation scheme in place, they have no basis to guide their interactions with different groups of customers.

Business & Decision defines distinct customer segments using a combination of internal and external data that examines customer needs, attributes, behaviors and intentions. We couple this data with an element of value analysis (e.g., profitability) to construct a segmentation approach that addresses both customer needs and customer value. This allows us to define who your customers are as well as the value they contribute to your organization.

With this additional insight, you can begin to answer questions such as:

• How do we profitably serve different customer segments?
• Should different product bundles and pricing be made available for each?
• How will sales, support and other internal processes need to evolve?
• Which segments should hold highest priority for customer service?
• Can we migrate customers to more profitable segments?
• How should our go-to-market strategy change if customers migrate from one segment to another?

Customer segmentation is not about applying a sliding scale of quality in treatment but rather adjusting go-to-market strategies and operations to capitalize on each segment's needs and profitability potential. Business & Decision can help you develop actionable customer segments that are understood and utilized organization-wide. When done correctly, companies experience lifts in important metrics including customer satisfaction, retention and cross-selling revenue, as well as better targeted, more successful prospect pursuits.