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By Knight Kiplinger

The Kiplinger Washington Editors

July 3, 2008

The largest U.S. banks are hurting badly, and the pain is starting to spread. Most small and midsize banks are still ready to lend to businesses, but they're getting nervous. This week's Kiplinger Letter examines the outlook.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Jobs, Employer Health Costs, Estate Taxes, Retail Retrenching, Legal Trends, Infrastructure Spending

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You Have Mounds of Customer Data -- Use It

Many businesses know far more about their customers than they think. Learn how to sift all that data and turn it into better sales and higher customer satisfaction.

Worth Reading: The Quick Take from Kiplinger

January 2008

Innoveer Solutions

Innoveer Solutions, a customer strategy and solutions consultancy, provides advanced customer management services to high-technology and healthcare companies, among others, in the areas of planning and strategy, technology implementation, and optimization.

Businesses collect different types of data on customers from multiple sources. Much of it is valuable -- or was at the time it was collected. Sorting through it and turning it into useful business information (BI) used to be a long and tedious process that, at best, produced snapshots of information that might be useful for spotting trends or long-term problems. But sales leads could grow stale. Customers could bolt by the time a pattern of dissatisfaction is spotted.

But new software from leading vendors is available to help companies manage customer data far more efficiently and quickly so it can be turned into actionable information. In a white paper titled Increased Business Intelligence: Turning Customer Data into a Competitive Advantage, the customer strategy consulting company Innoveer Solutions outlines how such information can be used and how to establish a plan that will make the most and best use of the new data.

"With such a plan, organizations can advance beyond simply capturing raw sales, service, and marketing data, to generating the deep insight needed to maximize business impact, while also ensuring a consistent approach to these issues across the entire organization," Innoveer writes. The paper points to various ways companies have made themselves more competitive with such information: from figuring out how to cherry-pick the most potentially lucrative sales leads from a list of local construction projects to setting up "dashboards" on the computers of account managers that compare their activity to that of their peers.

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