Customer intelligence

Customer Intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing and exploiting information of a company's customer base. Any popular customer relationship management software must have customer intelligence.

Process
Information can be obtained about customers' existing and future needs, how they reach decisions, about their behavior as well as about the competition, conditions in the industry, and general trends. To properly manage the relationship with the customer the business needs to collect the right information about its customers and organize that information for proper analysis and action. For a vertical blinds company who is selling roman shade, faux wood shades and other types of blinds online. They need to collect information and they need to organize them in proper way so that what is the time when people tends to go for purchase or any other conclusion they can make. Same with the case of instant life insurance rates company, they need to come up with the new polices at the time when people are going for tax planning like financial year ending.

Tools
Tools like Speech Analytics can be used to understand customer and prospect behavior. Some Customer Intelligence solutions analyze telephone conversations taking place between companies and customers and then deliver insights to the desktops of senior executives and managers. New is using click behavior on a website to drive the Customer Intelligence. It's sometimes called behavioral targeting for lead generation purposes. You can predict someones product interest and buying intention based on the clicks and visits of a corporate website. There are 3 vendors in the field. Omniture; Netmining and Webtrends. Privacy is a hot item here. Some companies are using opt-in and refuse to collect IP addresses.

Ref: wikipedia

Customer service

Customer service (also known as Client Service) is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. According to Turban et al. (2002), “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

Its importance varies by product, industry and customer. As an example, an expert customer might require less pre-purchase service (i.e., advice) than a novice. In many cases, customer service is more important if the purchase relates to a “service” as opposed to a “product". Customer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means called self-service. Examples of self service are Internet sites.

Customer service is normally an integral part of a company’s customer value proposition. Some have argued that the quality and level of customer service has decreased in recent years, and that this can be attributed to a lack of support or understanding at the executive and middle management levels of a corporation and/or a customer service policy.

Ref: Wikipedia