A Business Intelligence Solution for Assessing Customer Interaction, Cross-Selling, and Customization in a Customer intimacy Context

The ability to capture customer needs and to tailor the provided solutions accordingly, also defined as customer intimacy, has become a significant success factor in the B2B space in particular for increasingly "servitizing" businesses. Providers aim at achieving competitive advantages, such as cross-selling and customization by leveraging customer relationships and customer knowledge. However, the management of customer intimacy lacks analytical support. Many organizations struggle with measuring and proactively managing the degree of customer intimacy established with their customers. This work aims to remedy this issue by providing a business intelligence solution to assess three specific aspects of a customer intimacy strategy: customer interaction, customization, and cross-selling. The proposed solution CI Analytics leverages customer related data which is already available in the provider’s information system to derive customer intimacy metrics. These metrics are subsequently used to determine the investments of the provider in term of customer interaction time at both the employee and organization levels, as well as to evaluate the achieved degrees of customization and of cross-selling. This solution has been prototypically implemented and evaluated in an enterprise setting. It enables organizations to continuously measure the success of pursuing a customer intimacy strategy with their different customers.