A former colleague of mine always referred to his clients’ customer data as their crown jewels. He had a point. No one else knows as much about your customers’ behavior, attitudes, and preferences. If your customer data doesn’t seem valuable to you, imagine if your competitors had access to the very same information. What would they do with it?
There has been lots of talk about analytics as a source of competitive advantage. More recently, big data has promised to uncover untapped value and insights. However, have you thought more holistically about the resulting customer insights and intelligence? Used wisely, what you know about your customers can be a source of competitive advantage. It can help you increase market share by promoting the right product at the right time to the right person using the right channel. It can provide insights that enable you to improve marketing ROI, conversion rates, and conquesting. It can help you identify customers likely to defect, uncover what you need to do to retain them and help you determine if they are worth retaining based on their future lifetime value.
Finally, if you aren’t thinking about your “crown jewels”, I bet one of your competitors are. They may be able to purchase data about your customers from a third party vendor and use it for conquesting. If you don’t think customer data is valuable, your competitors do and they are willing to pay for it.