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For this reason, customer intelligence is becoming indispensable for many organizations, especially those focused on product-led growth (PLG); it allows them to understand customer expectations, anticipate their needs and offer relevant support at the right time. This is especially true in a world where companies may be managing hundreds or thousands of accounts with limited resources.  

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As a co-founder of LoudNClear, I’ve spent the last year or so meeting with business leaders to understand how they’re thinking about customers, and exploring the role customer intelligence can have in creating happy customers and supporting profitable growth. As I think about those conversations, I’m struck by how often crucial customer data resides in silos within the organization. 

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I believe there are five main reasons why an integrated approach to customer intelligence is key to long term growth:  

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1. Real time data improves decision making processes within a business

Central to customer health is timing and the ability to prioritize. When you can identify customer needs in real time, your support team can be proactive in dealing with an issue before it becomes a problem or, on a more positive note, offer a relevant upsell at just the right time. Beyond the CS team, understanding customer behavior and nurturing advocates can impact decisions on everything from launching new marketing campaigns to managing inventory to identifying new product or market opportunities.  

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2. Quality, integrated CI provides organizations with a unified view of customer health

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As I touched on above, understanding the customer shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of the customer success team. An integrated approach to customer intelligence gives you a 360-degree view of your customers, their activities and how they use your product or service; ultimately, it can help you gauge overall customer health. Not only does this help you identify customers who may be at risk, but it can also help you nurture the right customers into advocates and champions - a powerful asset for new business and an ally for innovation.    

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3. Insights help you maximize revenue

Customer intelligence is the foundation for maximizing revenue. Given that it’s five to seven times more expensive to win new customers, the ability to keep and grow your existing book of business is vital to sustainable growth and profitability.  From a CS perspective, it can ensure that the right customers are receiving the right level of service at the right time, reducing the risk of churn and increasing the likelihood of new revenue through cross sell and upsell. Clear data-based insights about which customers are at risk for churn and which ones might be interested in an upsell helps CSMs increase their NRR, and the business’s bottom line. 

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4. Customer support is streamlined and more efficient

An effective CS team has to be efficient, especially as a company scales. With the right CI tools in place, support teams can easily streamline processes across the department. When everyone is on the same page about how to identify which clients need support and what they need, teams can save hours of time that would have been spent manually reviewing accounts. Smooth processes and integrated technology also add efficiency when a team member joins, takes over a new portfolio or fills in for a colleague on vacation. 

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5. Do more with less.

We all know the economy right now is rocky, at best. Reducing costs and stretching current investments is fundamental to overall organizational health. As companies scale, one of the challenges I’ve seen is that CSMs don’t have the right tools and insight to manage the growing book of business (meaning quality suffers) or the company hires and trains more managers, which increases operational costs and impacts the bottom line. Once again, this is an area where I believe an integrated approach to customer intelligence can have an outsized impact on reducing churn and increasing profitability.

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From what I’m seeing and learning through conversations with colleagues and clients, good CI is key to winning in the marketplace. It’s about making sure that your business has the insight necessary to maximize revenue by responding quickly and appropriately to customer needs. It’s about ensuring that the entire organization understands how customer insight and overall health can help them do their jobs better too.  

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LoudNClear was created to provide companies with a single source of integrated information so that you can quickly gain a unified view of customer health across the organization. On a dedicated dashboard, CSMs receive notifications about who to reach out to, when and what to offer. In addition to gathering data about how customers use your platform and what they’re saying about it, LoudNClear eliminates the guesswork and is an indispensable tool for supporting profitability and growth. 

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If you’d like to find out more about what we do, please feel free to contact me directly at shaked@loudnclear.ai.

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