Customer Intelligence Platform: Key Features & 10 Notable Solutions

What is a Customer Intelligence Platform?

A customer intelligence platform is an analytics engine that harvests and analyzes crucial customer-vendor communication to unlock human relationship dynamics and optimize interactions with customer accounts. 

These platforms help understand user behavior and tendencies around crucial touch points in multi-channel communications – think of it as human analytics. Understanding what customers are saying and understanding what they are struggling with eventually helps create a better customer journey and optimize the overall experience for both new and existing users.

Customer success (CS) leaders use these AI-powered platforms to feel the pulse, understand customer sentiment regarding key factors, and uncover the crucial pain points to make the right business decisions with data-driven insights. 

Customer Intelligence Platform Benefits

Customer intelligence platforms are helping CS executives and managers gain a bird’s-eye view of all customer relationship activity. This technology is eliminating blind-spots and helping to optimize  processes for improved business outcomes.

Here are some key benefits:

• Persona-based communications: Customer Intelligence Platforms can be used to segment stakeholders or accounts and set different thresholds for relationship health. This granular approach can help treat each segment differently for better results.
• Customer journey optimization: There are more and more customer details to be taken into consideration today – onboarding requirements, success criteria, engagement tendencies, customer relationship friction points, satisfaction levels, feature feedback, and more. A customer intelligence platform helps challenge your assumptions and connects the dots to uncover what the customer is experiencing.
• Activity-driven decision making: Customer intelligence platforms are allowing businesses to generate activity-driven insights that can trigger immediate actions. Assuming the platform has the required integration and sharing capabilities, it can allow your team to strengthen key relationships proactively, generate better engagement, and create upselling opportunities.
• Better cross-department collaboration: Customer success, marketing, product, sales, IT, and support teams can now discover how customers feel about specific features or topics. They can also unearth new friction points that need to be fixed and discover new champions or advocates in accounts.

Related: Customer Sentiment Analysis 

What Questions Can You Answer with a Customer Intelligence Platform?

Customer Intelligence Platforms are helping answer a wide range of questions:

• What customers are talking about? What topics are trending? What features or processes add friction and frustration to their experience?
• How engaged customers are with your brand and Success teams? What are the engagement levels? Are there good relationship health signals? 
• What are you missing between the lines of what customers are saying? Is the data you are using in your decision in the right context?
• How do customers feel about you and your service and product? Are there any new sentiment trends you need to follow? Any bad signs or risk factors?

Related: Customer Insights Platform: Why You Need One

Key Features of Customer Intelligence Platforms

A customer intelligence platform needs to have the following capabilities:

• Bringing multi-channel communication data into one view– This is probably the biggest challenge CS teams are facing today. Emails, Phone calls, Zoom chats, Slack conversations, Chatbot activity, and Tickets are just a few of the ways customers are contacting businesses. All of these touchpoints need to be covered by the Customer Intelligence Platform to get a full picture.
• Stakeholder and account segmentation – Your CS team is interacting with a wide range of personas. This can be an executive, all the way down to a junior manager. The customer intelligence platform should answer questions like: Are you prioritizing the right tiers? Are you tracking customer team changes? Are there any loopholes that your team isn’t detecting?
• Customer sentiment analysis – Understanding customer sentiment is one of the biggest challenges in customer success today. With so many variables in play, only an advanced data-driven solution can help connect the dots, eliminate human intervention, and identify drops in customer sentiment that can trigger churn and brand damage.
• Real-time feedback – Analyzing and understanding the current health of your customer accounts is important, but your customer intelligence platform should also be able to notify the relevant internal team members in real-time with customizable alerts. Only being alerted early can help contain the damage by reaching out to at-risk accounts and taking the required steps.
  Integration with your customer success platform or CRM – A  customer intelligence platform should have good integration capabilities with leading reporting tools, CS tools, or APIs, not to mention your customer relationship management platform (CRM).

Related: Customer Relationship Score

10 Notable Customer Intelligence Platforms

1. Staircase

Staircase AI enhances customer relationships through deep insights and AI-driven analytics. It focuses on interpreting the nuances of customer interactions across various channels, aiming to reveal underlying sentiments and engagement patterns. The platform helps businesses strengthen their customer relationships proactively by identifying opportunities for growth and potential churn risks. By leveraging advanced AI algorithms, Staircase AI provides a detailed analysis of communication patterns, enabling Customer Success teams to anticipate needs and personalize their outreach efforts.

The platform helps visualize complex data, making it easy to grasp the health of customer relationships at a glance. Staircase AI excels in detecting shifts in customer sentiment, offering real-time alerts to ensure that teams can act swiftly to address concerns or capitalize on positive feedback. Its integration capabilities allow for seamless collaboration with existing customer success and CRM tools.

2. SAS Customer Intelligence 360

SAS Customer Intelligence 360 uses its advanced analytics capabilities to provide marketing intelligence and customer journey insights. It can perform complex data analysis, with its capability to construct OLAP cubes for rapid data processing. This is particularly useful for enterprises that manage vast datasets. However, the platform also requires IT and development resources to fully exploit its analytics capabilities.

Key features of SAS include dynamic data collection and contextualization, capture of anonymous behaviors, and the application of predictive models for forecasting. These features, alongside dynamic content placement and digital asset management, are part of the larger SAS® Customer Intelligence suite.  In addition, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 uses an open API architecture and easily integrates with existing technology stacks.

3. YouGov

YouGov offers direct access to customer insights through a comprehensive panel of millions of consumers worldwide. It delivers actionable data from its large database, helping businesses understand their audience’s preferences, behaviors, and opinions. With access to over 24 million members globally, YouGov facilitates deep analyses into consumer trends, needs, and motivations, making it useful for creating detailed customer personas.

Key features of YouGov include customizable customer data through in-depth research, polls, and surveys, supported by an extensive profiling capability based on over a million data points. This allows for the crafting of rich, detailed personas using up-to-date variables, ranging from brand usage to social media habits.

4. ActionIQ

ActionIQ integrates rich customer data into CRMs, facilitating informed interactions and personalized customer experiences. It transforms customer behavior data into detailed profiles and segments, enabling tailored engagement strategies. The platform provides a comprehensive view of customer activities across multiple channels, allowing for the orchestration of personalized customer journeys. It can also identify at-risk customers and potential upsell opportunities.

The platform’s key features include 360-degree customer profiles, journey orchestration, and advanced segmentation. It supports personalized offer timing and targeting, reducing churn by addressing customers’ specific needs and preferences, and identifies product affinities, enabling targeted campaigns that drive conversions and revenue growth. ActionIQ integrates with common sales and marketing tools like Salesforce, Shopify, and Facebook Ads. 

5. Leadspace

Leadspace focuses on optimizing sales efforts by pinpointing the most promising accounts and leads. It uses both first-party and third-party data, enriching buyer profiles and personas for more effective targeting. Designed with account-based marketing (ABM) in mind, Leadspace offers predictive B2B profiles that guide sales reps to focus on leads with the highest conversion potential. This approach streamlines the sales process and ensures that marketing and sales efforts are aligned.

Leadspace integrates intent data and persona-based insights into CRM systems. This enables sales teams to access context-rich profiles, enhancing their ability to engage potential customers. Its predictive capabilities allow for a more nuanced understanding of customer intent and the likelihood of engagement. By providing detailed information directly within the CRM, Leadspace ensures that sales and marketing teams can quickly leverage these insights to close deals and drive revenue growth.

6. Funnel

Funnel automates and streamlines data collection and integration from marketing and advertising sources. It simplifies the consolidation, transformation, and feeding of data into business intelligence tools or data warehouses. Funnel supports a wide array of data sources, enabling users to aggregate information without the need for extensive coding or IT involvement. This capability ensures marketers have timely access to harmonized marketing performance data.

Funnel provides easy-to-use, flexible data handling features. Its analytics features allow users to dive deep into their marketing data to uncover insights and trends that can drive optimization and growth. Additionally, Funnel’s commitment to data accuracy and integrity ensures that decision-makers can rely on the platform for precise and actionable insights.

7. ZyloTech

ZyloTech is a customer data platform (CDP), which uses AI to drive personalized customer engagement and loyalty. It enables marketers to craft personalized campaigns that resonate with individual customer preferences and behaviors. The platform provides an AI-driven analytics engine, which processes and segments customer data in real-time, offering businesses a granular understanding of their customer base.

ZyloTech supports data-driven personalization with segmentation tools, predictive analytics, and automated marketing recommendations, all designed to support complex marketing strategies. The platform integrates with existing marketing technology stacks, enhancing its utility by enabling marketers to leverage their data more effectively across various channels. It places a strong focus on data privacy and compliance, ensuring that businesses can meet the requirements of industry standards and data privacy regulations.

8. Customer Thermometer

Customer Thermometer is a feedback tool that provides a simple way to capture real-time customer sentiment. It provides customizable feedback buttons, which brands can align with their visual identity and look and feel.

Designed to integrate seamlessly into emails, helpdesks, and messaging platforms, Customer Thermometer allows businesses to gather instant feedback through a simple, one-click response mechanism. This immediacy helps companies gauge customer satisfaction levels immediately after interactions, making it an invaluable tool for maintaining high service standards. 

Beyond satisfaction scores, Customer Thermometer provides detailed analytics and reporting features that offer deeper insights into customer trends, sentiment over time, and areas for improvement. Its ability to trigger alerts based on specific feedback scores ensures that businesses can act fast to address customer concerns.

9. IBM Predictive Customer Intelligence 

IBM Predictive Customer Intelligence is an analytics solution designed to transform customer data into actionable insights, enabling personalized customer experiences across multiple channels. Leveraging IBM’s advanced analytics capabilities, it predicts customer behavior and preferences, helping businesses tailor their offerings and interactions to meet individual needs. 

The platform utilizes a range of analytical techniques, including predictive modeling, segmentation, and real-time scoring, to deliver personalized recommendations and decisions that can improve customer engagement and satisfaction.

IBM Predictive Customer Intelligence integrates with existing business systems, allowing it to provide a unified view of the customer across different touchpoints and channels. It is highly scalable, making it suitable for large enterprises with complex customer data landscapes.

10. Selligent

Selligent is a marketing automation platform that can deliver omni channel messaging and personalized customer experiences. It is based on a consumer-first marketing approach, which prioritizes individual customer preferences and behaviors across all channels. 

Selligent’s platform combines advanced analytics, AI-driven personalization, and automation capabilities to enable execution of highly targeted campaigns. It facilitates real-time decision-making, allowing marketers to adapt their strategies based on current customer behavior and trends. 

Why Choose Staircase’s Customer Success-Centric Customer Intelligence Platform?

Staircase is disrupting the Customer Success space with its AI-driven Customer Intelligence Platform. Besides providing stakeholder relationship tracking with ongoing customer sentiment analysis, it  helps you pick up on signals about how your customers are feeling to help you proactively prevent dissatisfaction and churn beforehand, while also clearing roadblocks to help them achieve their goals.

This Customer Intelligence Platform leverages the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze millions of customer interactions and turns them into actionable customer insights that can’t be spotted with the naked eye. By adopting this solution, you can uncover deep human signals, customers’ health status, sentiment fluctuations, journey events, and underlying risks, while creating new growth opportunities. 

Learn more about the Staircase AI platform