Hi Customer Intelligence peers! I’m Christy Augustine, Bloomreach COO, involve.ai customer, and member of the Customer Intelligence Advisory Board.

The involve.ai team invited me to share our approach to Customer Intelligence (CI) and, as an early(ish) adopter, I’m happy to! As I told the team, CI is a rapidly growing differentiator; companies that aren’t thinking about it yet are behind. Net Revenue Retention already drives significant differences in company valuations, and in one to two years, CI will be the gold standard. I hope our story helps other leaders plan the leap.

For Bloomreach, it was a clear leap. As a cloud company that helps organizations grow commerce through personalized engagement, discovery and content, we were founded on Big Data. Bloomreach customers use our solutions to increase traffic, boost search revenue, create targeted digital strategies, and much more. 

Given our data-driven roots, we have paid attention to CS data from the beginning. In the early days, that meant spreadsheets and basic health scoring, but it was so reactive. When technology caught up, we began looking for something like involve.ai: automation, immediacy and prediction. 

Our approach to setting up involve.ai and a CI program

Technology is amazing, but at Bloomreach we are of the mindset that you can’t leave everything up to a platform. You need to combine technology with business intelligence, machine learning with human creativity. We have taken this approach in establishing our CI program and I absolutely recommend it!

We started with our goal.

While we care about churn (we live by “Only the paranoid survive” - Andy Grove), our CI priority is to understand better upsell and cross-sell.

Then, we developed hypotheses.

Why do we think upsell occurs? What factors do we suspect play into customer behaviors? Starting with the answers we wanted helped us determine what data we needed and then what data we had versus didn’t have. I would imagine presenting to our board and think: “Okay, in my dream world, what is the deck I’d present?” Layering in existing data and insights, what else did we need to tell a comprehensive story?  What data could we not tell the story without (regardless of if it was easy to get or available)?

Finally, we went about collecting, or determining how to collect, that essential data! 

We are working closely with our:

• Education team to track Academy data

• Product Management and Product Ops team to track product usage data

• And CS and Account Management teams to track account data and sentiment

In time, we will likely roll in other teams, but we’re still onboarding and learning as we go. 

One of my own lessons-learned that I’d encourage others going through this process to consider: I approached teams in a quick We-need-this-data way, versus a slower Here’s-what-we’re-trying-to-accomplish way. If I could start over, I’d take the latter, slower approach, and bring these teams along on the planning journey. Each team knows their own methods and approaches best and might have ideas we hadn’t considered to make our CI program even stronger.

My team and I are so excited to launch our CI program through involve.ai, and to watch the insights roll in. In the meantime, reach out in the comments if you’d like to learn more about Bloomreach’s CI goals or involve.ai partnership, the way we are setting up for success, or just to chat about CI!