Buyers guide for an enterprise customer intelligence platform

Customer insights are worth their weight in gold. We know this. You know this. So why do so many companies struggle to effectively share and utilize the insights they work so hard to collect across their organization?

The answer lies in the lack of a quality enterprise customer insights platform, which thankfully can be fixed.

Customer insights are the backbone of any successful product—and as your enterprise grows or evolves, you need a customer intelligence platform that will scale with you.

In this article, we will be breaking down the essential things you need to consider when choosing an enterprise-level customer intelligence platform, from key features to look for to best practices for implementing the platform into your existing workflows. By the end, you’ll have actionable steps to choose the right platform for your organization’s needs.

Brands that listen to their customers build successful products. Those that don’t, don’t. It’s as simple as that. 

As more organizations are evolving the way they collect and leverage customer knowledge to include a more inclusive approach across multiple teams, committing the time and resources to pick the right customer insights software is essential.

Regardless of what industry you work within, your organization needs to consider the following when choosing a customer intelligence platform:

• Does the platform allow for collaboration across different departments, teams, and the third-party applications you use?

• What is the security level of the platform? If you work with sensitive and secure data, what guarantees does the platform offer to avoid potential risks and leaks?

• Is the platform compliant with existing regulations and laws within your industry? Do they regularly upkeep with changing compliance requirements?

• What level of data governance does the platform offer? Does it match with existing practices within your company?

• Is the platform scalable? Is it capable of adapting and growing with your company, as your needs and scope expands?

Using these questions as a guide, let’s deep dive into how you can answer them, using a few key features we recommend looking for in any enterprise customer insights software.

When choosing a customer intelligence platform, you want to look for an option that provides the following essential features:

Scalability

As your company grows and goes deeper into customer research opportunities, the amount of data you will collect will only increase. A great enterprise customer intelligence platform will be able to accommodate this, but also will be the key to your entire organization having access to the customer intelligence that will foster the decision-making process.

Things like customer interviews, survey responses, and social media sentiment analysis quickly pile up as you expand your efforts—so before committing to a platform, you need to guarantee that it is capable of providing you with quality insights without performance issues, quality and security concerns, regardless of the amount of data, users, and external tools you integrate.

Security and compliance

Without a doubt, the customer intelligence platform you choose should meet all security and compliance requirements that your organization and all associated governing bodies have. If not, it will only lead to pain and frustration down the line—and, in the worst-case scenario, could lead to costly data leaks and potential legal action.

Before choosing a platform, confirm all regulatory compliance requirements you need to meet within your industry, and be sure to ask all potential vendors if they can meet those requirements. Better yet, check to see if the vendor is proactive in meeting compliance demands. Some examples of security standards to check for include:

• GDPR

• SOC 2

• ISO 27001

• HIPAA

• PCI DSS

This may slow down the process, but it’s worth the up-front work to avoid disasters later. To learn about Dovetail’s security and compliance standards, visit our Trust Center.

Collaboration and access control

If you have a big team or regularly collaborate with different departments across your organization, having a customer intelligence software that prioritizes easy data sharing and insight access is a must.

As the voice of the customer is being brought to more teams within organizations, being able to share the right insights easily and without hassle is a game-changer. Because of this, be on the lookout for a platform that not only allows for cross-team collaboration but also uses role-based permissions to give different people unique levels of access to the data. Integrations that allow for customer knowledge to be fed directly into Slack or Microsoft teams, like Ask Dovetail, are a great way to achieve this goal.

Integration capabilities

Any customer intelligence platform you consider should be compatible with your existing tools and it should be seamless to get data in. Otherwise, it’s going to instantly create data silos that will massively impact the efficiency of your research processes.

While assessing a new platform, take stock of your existing CRM, analytic platforms, scheduling calendar, and data lakes. During the sales call with a potential vendor, mention the platforms and plug-ins you currently use to ensure they are compatible with the new platform or that the platform has an API, allowing you to build your own custom integrations.

Knowledge management

Finally, something that is often overlooked is the presence of a centralized platform for all data and insights. 

Acting as the go-to place for everything you need for customer knowledge, platforms with this type of centralized hub help boost efficiency and reduce data silos. Because of this, we recommend looking for a platform that enables your organization to store, search, and analyze your customer data for the best possible results—trust us on this one—it will quickly become your favorite benefit!

Once you’ve gone through your pick of potential customer insights platform vendors that offer the needed features, you need to make the final decision.

When comparing your options, we recommend checking for the following:

Support at every customer touchpoint

When using the platform, your team should be able to accept data from every customer touchpoint, whether it be app reviews, sales calls, feedback on social media, and more.

At Dovetail, we strive to make customer insights as accessible as possible by removing common barriers. Does your team need to analyze customer calls? Simply integrate your customer insights hub with Zoom or your calendar, and your call recordings will be uploaded to Dovetail instantly.

Need industry reports, survey responses, or any other document added to your customer insights hub? Sync Dovetail with your Google Drive or OneDrive for instant uploads.

Working with unique systems or have strict requirements? Use the Dovetail API to customize the pathway between your systems and your intelligence platform, all on your own terms.

Structure to organize your data

The last thing you want from a new platform is for it to create another data silo. Instead, you want crisp, clean, organized data sets—easily labeled and put into taxonomies for you to effortlessly gain valuable insights from.

Dovetail makes it easy to create these taxonomies across all types of data. With our tagging capabilities—paired with our AI-powered theme detection—you can easily uncover trends in your data. 

Plus, you can adjust your tags anytime, giving you ultimate control to isolate and analyze data for specific projects to ensure you have everything you need.

Built-in democratization

Any enterprise customer intelligence platform worth considering must make findings easy to share, report on, and access.

It should make it simple for anyone to interact with customer knowledge, regardless of their role within your organization. As more insights are discovered, a powerful intelligence platform will automatically share that information with the places where it’s needed. 

New design insights? Dovetail can share that with your design team in Figma. Product insights? Your development team can use those findings in ProductBoard.

Your team works hard to collect meaningful customer knowledge, so make sure the customer intelligence platform you use knows how to funnel that knowledge to every corner of your organization.

OK, so you’ve made the decision on which platform to use. Now what? 

Even if you pick the best possible customer intelligence platform, the way you implement and adopt it into your existing systems will dictate how successful the effort is.

To make sure this process is as smooth as possible, we recommend:

• Creating a clear implementation plan — Before jumping in, make a plan to keep you on track. Include things like compliance checks, setting permissions, implementing custom vocabulary, and more to make things run smoothly.

• Focusing on training — You need full buy-in from your team to make your new platform effective. Using group and solo training opportunities, take the time to get everyone on the same page. Consider role-based training, running interactive demos and set expectations as you switch to streamline the adoption process.

• Be open to feedback — Even with the best plan in place, issues may arise. Combat tensions and make helpful adjustments by openly accepting and encouraging feedback from all team members as you make the switch.

Choosing the right enterprise-level customer intelligence platform can make or break your efforts to become more customer-centric. Are you using software capable of adapting and growing with your organization’s goals?

Dovetail is the AI-first customer intelligence platform that large-scale enterprises love. Join companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Zapier that use our platform and unlock the fastest way to understand your customers.

Connect with our sales team today to learn how our enterprise solutions will change your UX research practices forever. Not ready for a call? Download our free white paper, How a centralized customer insights hub drives growth, to learn more, or discover more resources to help your organization understand how to leverage the power of customer intelligence.

Let’s transform your customer data into real, actionable insights, all in one place.