Why is Customer Intelligence Important in 2025?

Why is Customer Intelligence Important?

Because it’s Business Intelligence.

Over 60% of marketing leaders say their biggest challenge is a tendency to prioritise financial results over customer outcomes. Frankly, this doesn’t make sense. Businesses exist to make money. Meeting customer needs is the best way to do that.

• 62% of “customer-obsessed” companies saw higher margins (SAP Emarsys, 2022).
• They also reported 41% faster revenue growth and 51% higher retention than non-customer-obsessed organisations (Forrester, 2024).
• Loyal customers are 64% more likely to buy frequently and 31% more likely to pay a premium (McKinsey, 2022).

So, why do businesses focus on financial results instead of customer outcomes? Our guess is they don’t understand their customers. At least not individually.

Numbers are easier to track, analyse, and impact than customer behaviour. But financial results and third-party data aren’t enough to make smart decisions. Without customer intelligence, the numbers tell you very little – and give you even less to work with.

Challenge 1: Who Are Your Customers?

Most serious companies have some kind of customer intelligence platform. Many have multiple platforms. That’s a good start. Whether you work with a CDP, CRM, analytics platform, or custom-built solution isn’t so important at this stage. What matters is that you have a place to collect and store information about the people interacting with your brand.

First-Party Data is Non-Negotiable

Not all data is useful. And not all useful data stays useful forever. The more accurate and relevant your data, the more personalised and valuable your experiences can be. 

• First-party data: Info you collect directly from customers, like purchase history, site behaviour, preferences, and survey responses.
• Second-party data: Someone else’s first-party data that you use with permission (think: partnerships).
• Third-party data: Aggregated from multiple sources and sold to marketers. Often messy, outdated, or both.

One of the most valuable things your organisation can do in pursuit of better customer experiences is to collect high-quality first-party data. Second- and third-party data can be useful to create broad segments and targeting strategies, but only first-party data can tell you who a customer really is. 

Customer Intelligence Platforms

In a best-case scenario, data feeds into a shared repository that marketing, sales, operations, IT, leadership, and customer service can all access. They all get the same cohesive view of individuals with data they can use to prove why customer intelligence is important.

In reality, individual teams with individual data strategies often collect data that’s relevant to their sphere of influence. They end up with an incomplete picture of customers. Using a customer intelligence platform to combine these fragments is the most effective way to complete your customer profile.

Over the last decade, CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) have been the main tool of choice. A CDP collects data from all touchpoints, standardises it, and makes it accessible to delivery and analytics platforms. It provides a centralised, up-to-date view of individual customers. 

A CDP might be the right solution for your business, or it might not be. Compliance, governance, hygiene, and relevance are also factors to be considered. If you want to go deeper into the technical weeds on that, we’ll have a follow-up guide to connecting customer experiences – that’s coming soon.

The takeaway for now is that customer intelligence needs a reliable data foundation.

Challenge 2: What do Customers Want? (And Why do We Care?)

Why is customer intelligence important? Because what’s good for customers is good for business. We’d even go a step further: You can’t run a successful business long-term without catering to customers’ needs. The only way to understand those needs is by getting closer to your customers.

Understanding Value Drivers

Take the example of a supermarket in the diagram below. (The numbers are fictional but inspired by real experience.)

When customers are anonymous, the supermarket has two revenue levers: gross transactions and spend per transaction. This doesn’t leave much room for creativity. Increasing either result will require big-budget campaigns, higher shelf prices, or a lot of trial and error.

On the other hand, when the supermarket knows its customers, more levers – and more layers – become available. Granular customer intelligence is the key to not only understanding what drives top-line revenue but also making targeted changes to increase it.

• Re-engaging customers who haven’t shopped in a while.
• Personalised offers on frequently bought items.
• Loyalty discounts and incentives.
• Family-and-friends offers or ‘shop together’ campaigns.
• Weekly and seasonal offers on goods they actually want.

The options go from more foot traffic and higher grocery prices to a slew of strategic initiatives. At the same time, the supermarket benefits from a loyal customer’s habit of spending more.

“Even if you disregard the numbers, the diagram shows the value of knowing who your customers are. You can analyse the value of loyalty, and apply lenses to understand how it breaks down across different parameters. From there, you can launch targeted initiatives – discount offers or rewards campaigns, not expensive ad buys – that resonate with customers’ actual interests.”

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting.

Reframing Objectives and KPIs

As marketers, we love metrics. They’re relatively easy to collect, understand, and impact. But if you’re not layering metrics into customer-centric KPIs, you’re focusing in the wrong place.

Let’s say you focus on cost per acquisition (CPA). You bring it down over three consecutive quarters. That seems good until you realise that you’ve ignored retention efforts and let churn rates increase. You’re spending less to acquire new customers, but they’re worth so much less over time that topline revenue takes a disproportionate hit.

Instead, CPA is a useful metric to enrich a target like total customer numbers or retention rates. Alongside other metrics like satisfaction scores, on-site engagement, or CRM interactions, CPA helps to understand whether the business is winning (and keeping) the right kinds of customers.

Don’t throw out tactical metrics. They’re still useful for analysing performance and optimising strategies. The key is to clarify how they contribute to customer-centric KPIs, and how those KPIs contribute to business goals. 

One way to embed this into everyday work is to rewrite individual or team targets in the language of customer value. 

“Businesses that focus on financial goals don’t necessarily have a priority problem. They have a perspective problem. They need to adjust their frame of reference so that addressing customer needs becomes a path to achieving commercial results. This means investing in customer intelligence is important to know who customers are, what they want, and how they contribute to big-picture business goals.”

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting, Tap CXM.

One KPI is Rarely Enough

Some old-school KPIs translate neatly to customer-facing metrics. Others don’t. This isn’t a bad thing. It just means you need to capture the nuance in a blended scorecard.
Over-indexing on a single KPI is the same as limiting reports to a single metric. Team success often depends on a combination of customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and customer value targets linked to commercial outcomes. It’s the same story at the departmental and organisational level.

Customer Intelligence Has Never Been More Important

Customer experience is the battlefield of modern business. And customer intelligence is important as the vital intel that informs strategic moves.
The better you understand your customers, the more relevant, valuable, and consistent your experiences become. The more confident your teams become in making decisions. The more loyalty your customers feel.

Customer intelligence is the fountain of knowledge that guides decisions around marketing, operations, and long-term investment. It’s also a catalyst for bringing the organisation together with a common, customer-first aim.

To learn how this manifests in organisations that put customers first, check out our follow-up article: How Brands Build Customer Centricity.

This guide is part of our in-depth series on designing and optimising customer journeys. You can download our comprehensive Customer Journey Playbook now to read more.