A healthy innovation pipeline requires an understanding of the customer. By organizing customer information and making it easily available to decision makers in the company, you open up the gates of innovation. There are many tools available today to organize and extend the value of a customer database. "Can you describe your customers for me?" Ask that question of a company with a healthy innovation pipeline and the answer will be timely, thoughtful and reflective of distinct profitable segments.

At companies struggling to maintain relevancy in the marketplace, however, customer information is often old, anecdotal, or biased; maintaining a momentum that can destroy a critical connection in the company’s innovation pipeline.

This difference has become more apparent as companies fail in this credit starved economy.

The problem is not always that companies are not finding out about customers, it often is that they have not made the effort to organize the data. Enter customer management technology. You can call it Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Management Software, or Sales Automation (SA), but it all amounts to storing information in a way that facilitates a consistent, timely and descriptive understanding of your existing customer base.

A former client in the beer industry used Salesforce.com Dashboards to provide real-time information to brand managers about their customers (and non-customers). Even though they didn’t transact directly with end customers, they aggregated surveys, customer inquiries, and third-party studies coming from different functional areas of the organization at an individual level (when possible). In this case, decisions about sports sponsorship, promotion and marketing programs reflected the customers’ changing tastes and interests. They didn’t have to wait for a meeting to discuss the information to be gathered — it was on their desktop.

Using technology to track customer information is no longer just for the big guys. There is an offering to fit every business size. From products like Salesforce.com that can be purchased and up and running in a month, to customer data mining applications that take enterprise level integration efforts.

Additionally there is a robust marketplace of applications that work with these systems. Salesforce.com’s AppExchange has add-ons that put powerful survey, email campaign, analysis, and visualization tools in reach of your employees. Riskonnect ERM is one of the most innovative risk management tools that I have seen. It provides a visualization framework that can be customized with information such as customer satisfaction or life-stage distribution.

The potential uses of organized customer information can feed marketing, product development and even M&A activity. The claim of a merger based on complimentary customer bases would be far more convincing with the means to quantify it.
Innovation happens because employees care about meeting customer needs. Thus, meeting customers should be a core competency of every business.

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