The rapid growth of these new channels of communication, commonly referred to as the social web, are providing organisations with an almighty deluge of information as consumers take to their laptops, PCs and smartphones to join and create online communities in ever-increasing numbers. Not all the feedback is positive, but the value to be extracted from this communication is potentially enormous.

Firms that monitor and act upon these insights see a unique opportunity to improve market performance accordingly. This may mean changing the way products are developed and brought to market. It could mean the creation of new cross-departmental efforts to ensure that critical customer insights are properly disseminated. In any case, these new information channels demand that executives look at the definition of a valuable customer in a very different way. For most companies, these efforts are nascent. On the one hand, survey results and executive interviews reveal that social media and other new communication channels have led executives to admit that a new definition of customer value is necessary. On the other, few companies have figured out how to rewrite that definition properly, or how to build a strategy that takes those insights into account in a formal way.

Nevertheless, important first steps are being taken: nearly 60% of survey respondents say that their companies are considering how to redefine customer value, and about 55% say that customer service is now an enterprise-wide responsibility. Additional key survey findings include:

Today's communication tools are creating a new transparency between companies and their customers. This transparency is being imposed by customers seeking to interact with managers, employees and executives across an organisation. Greater contact between consumers and C-suite executives marks one of the more significant changes brought by these new levels of interaction with customers—and one that is already enhancing customer value at firms that are embracing it. In fact, more than one-third of survey respondents report that their customers are already sharing their thoughts and opinions about their company on social networks, and 71% report that customers are now a critical source for innovative ideas for their companies.

Extracting a competitive edge from these new channels will require careful analysis of customer behaviour. Analysing the new patterns of customer interactions will not be easy, considering their high volume and frequency. Early adapters are already doing this. Given the many ways in which companies are interacting with customers, data will need to be shared more widely and analysed quickly so that the appropriate action can be taken. This presents a significant challenge: just 52% of survey respondents are confident that their companies are using technology adequately to understand customers, and just over one-quarter believe that their companies are able to respond adequately to new business environments.

Organisations need to broaden their approach to market information. In the C-suite, this means that the CMO should consider how to integrate multi-channel customer feedback–including social networks, blogs and online communities—with conventional inputs. Marketing executives will need to be as comfortable interpreting these data as they are with traditional means of tracking customers. The CMO may need to train staff across the organisation to handle these tasks or set up a dedicated team to tackle the increasing flow of customer input.

The CMO should partner with the CFO, and share information more frequently with the legal and risk departments. Currently, this link has been forged primarily in the heat of crisis, when companies are facing falling revenue or a situation that can harm the firm's reputation. Smart competitors will pull finance, risk and marketing together as a matter of course to leverage customer inputs for wider benefits.