Data to Delight in the Age of the Customer

We are in the Experience Economy that Pine and Gilmore predicted – a customer-centric marketplace that Forrester calls the Age of the Customer where:

“A customer obsessed company focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of an engagement with customers, and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.”

Age of the Customer

We live in a world full of so much information that we need predictive analytics just to make sense of it – where successful organizations transform data to delight.

Experience Makers like Intuit know this well. Intuit collects a lot of data on more than 5 million Mint users. The service becomes more than just tracking your spending, but becomes a tool for comparison. Users can compare their financial situations to others who are similarly situated by demographic, geography or other factors. The service can tell users how much money they’d save by switching to a new credit card or refinancing their mortgages.

“The [alerts users] really dig is when we give them personalized information,” Denzel, Intuit Senior VP of Big Data, Social Design and Marketing, said, comparing Mint to her ink-ordering printer that saves her trips to the office supply store. “At least someone in this house is helping me.”

“The last mile is always humans,” Denzel explains Intuit continuously tests everything from ads to product design to find out what’s working best for customers. If your experience tells you something should work but customers don’t respond, you’re wrong.