What's driving all the current interest in customer intelligence? That's the question that Bob Thompson of CRM Guru recently put to an illustrious panel of software executives in the intelligent marketing sector. Their answers were quite interesting.

Ellen Olson, VP of Marketing for E.piphany, contends a "shift" is under way. "A lot of organizations have made, over the last five years, huge CRM investments. They’ve spent a lot of time putting solutions in place, building data warehouses, building data marts, they’ve gathered a lot of information about the customers."

Companies are now trying to "unlock the value" of these systems, said Olson. "That’s probably the hottest topic that we see happening in the industry. Organizations have cut about all the costs that they can cut out of the equation, so they’re looking for ways to drive revenue. They’re looking for ways to be able to cross-sell, to broaden share of wallet. They’re looking for ways to really understand customer profitability, and at the end of the day, analytics is at the heart of that equation."

It may also be the declining responses associated with outbound marketing -- whether it's telemarketing or direct marketing. "The direct marketers are in a very difficult position," said Court Cunningham, SVP of Marketing Automation at DoubleClick. "Their input costs are going up, postage costs and printing costs are going up, and response rates are declining... and people have finally realized that they can’t just carpet bomb consumers, and they need to become more intelligent about contact strategies. So a lot of this is about being more intelligent with a fixed marketing budget and trying to touch consumers less, but generate more revenue."

Finally, Jim Davis, CMO of SAS, noted that the demand for intelligence-driven action is rising everywhere. "We’re seeing this not only in the customer intelligence area, but in all intelligence areas within organizations right now," he noted. "There’s a real need to optimize processes within the organization, to fine tune the various attributes associated with your enterprise, and obviously, the customer is one of those areas. [W]e’ve got to be smart in what we do, not only in terms of how we personalize the service to the customer, but also in terms of how we spend our marketing budgets."