Build for Change: Revolutionizing Customer Engagement through Continuous Digital Innovation

Chapter 3Adding Judgment and Desire

Source: Barton Silverman/The New York Times/Redux. Used with permission.

Your business now has vastly more customer information than ever before. This information is no longer restricted to your internal customer database, but is complemented and frequently dwarfed by syndicated market research, sentiment, and opinion inferred from voice and text analysis, and perhaps even data aggregated from social media and Websites. It’s that latter category of aggregated data from social media and Websites that is such a game changer, particularly when it comes to Gen D. People are no longer surprised to find that you can get information about employees from LinkedIn that is richer than anything their own human resources departments have on hand. Now this detailed information can be correlated from across many domains—a source of even more information, or the collective memory of interactions from across the Internet.

It is only useful, though, if you can figure out how to complement it. Sure, data can tell you who the customer was, but who is only one of the “six Ws” necessary to tell a full story. You’ll see shortly why you need all six; they are no less important to great customer centricity than they are to top-notch journalism. Plus, data—that is, memory—can at best only suggest who your customer might be tomorrow, or who might be your next customer. ...