BARE Shares – How To Improve Customer Experiences With Real-Time Analytics

‘Real-Time Analytics: The Key To Unlocking Customer Insights & Driving The Customer Experience finds that customer analytics are essential for improving customer experiences across all marketing, selling and service channels an enterprise relies on.’ Here, BARE International shares an article by Louis Columbus for Forbes on How to Improve Customer Experiences with Real-Time Analytics.

‘Fascinating insights are from a new study conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in conjunction with SAS, Intel and Accenture Applied Intelligence. The study is a quick, insightful read of 16 pages that combines survey findings and enterprises’ marketing results. The methodology is based on interviews with more than 560 business leaders drawn from the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council and the Harvard Business Review audience of readers in February and March 2018.

“The expectation of consumers today is that everything exists in the world of the now and that their interactions will be personalized,” says Jeff Jacobs

The study finds that banking, retail, and telecommunications have the greatest upside growth potential from adopting customer analytics. The following are the ways enterprises are using real-time customer analytics to improve revenue:

• 60% of enterprise business leaders say customer analytics is extremely important today, jumping to 79% by 2020 with a key driver being personalization at scale. Enterprises successfully adopting customer analytics today are concentrating on the goal of providing personalization at scale by continually fine-tuning every aspect of the marketing mix for every customer audience or persona in real-time. Highest achieving enterprises have developed machine learning algorithms that learn when and how to offer upsell and product recommendations, adjust pricing based on demand and competitive pricing strategies.
• Scaling real-time customer analytics cross-functionally (69%) is the leading growth driver with enterprises creating real-time marketing technologies stacks to scale. Fulfilling the vision of a customer-centric enterprise is what initially motives large-scale businesses to invest in real-time customer analytics. Contributing business drivers also include designing and strengthening contextual engagements across customer journeys (62%), improve the accuracy of demand planning and product/services availability (50%) and better address and respond to competitive and regulatory market pressures (39%).
• Despite the proven value of using real-time customer analytics to produce more revenue only 16% considered their brands very effective at delivering real-time interactions across various channels.Further, 30% indicated they were not effective at all. There’s a major gap between what real-time customer analytics business cases are showing as potential contributions versus what some enterprises are accomplishing. With the majority of the business leaders (60%) saying that delivering real-time customer interactions is extremely important today and 79% by 2020, it’s time for greater focus and effort on how to enable customer analytics’ contributions to happen.
• Enterprises’ definition of successful real-time customer analytics use cases are prioritizing the ability to translate data into actionable insight at the optimal time (83%), yet just 22% are having success with this strategy today. This 61% gap is the widest between enterprise leader’s expectations and experience, signaling the challenges of creating and using a real-time marketing technology stack. The second greatest gap is in the area of data accessibility (80%) or getting the right data to the right people at the right time. Lack of integration options to legacy systems is one of the primary factors slowing down data accessibility and the ability to access and use all available data in a seamless fashion (73%). The biggest gaps in real-time customer analytics capabilities are in the areas of accessing customer data, performing analytics on those data, and taking action based on the resulting insights. The following graphic illustrates the greatest differences between expectations and experiences on the part of enterprise business leaders using real-time customer analytics.
• Clear strategies and goals (42%) for attaining personalization at scale and being able to produce actionable data & visualizations (39%) are the two most important success factors enterprises concentrate on today. The more support for these goals from the CEO, CMO, and CIO, the greater the success in overcoming the challenges of legacy systems, data & organizational silos, and multichannel complexity.
• Improving customer experiences (85%) to improve customer retention and loyalty (58%) is where real-time customer analytics are delivering the greatest business value today. Enterprises are finding that the effort to create a real-time marketing technology stack pays off by delivering in-depth customer insight and intelligence. The study provides examples of how H&R Block, a leader in tax consulting and preparation services, uses real-time customer analytics to ensure every customer touchpoint is a successful one. The company implemented a new CRM system four years ago and today has decision engine and machine learning capabilities that provide insights into how they can course-correct strategies for each step of a customer’s journey with them.

Roadmap: How To Improve Customer Experiences With Real-Time Analytics

Based on the collaborative efforts of the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. SAS, Intel, and Accenture Applied Intelligence have produced a roadmap for where any company can begin to improve customer experiences with real-time analytics. Many of these also apply to any enterprise software project. Their importance is underscored by the need to define a cohesive, integrated and goal-driven real-time marketing technology stack that can deliver personalization at scale across a global enterprise:

1. Finding a C-Level champion increases the probability of success by 70% or more. This applies to every enterprise software project, and it’s been my experience a C-level executive can move organizational boulders out of the way to get work done faster than any series of meetings could ever hope to. They create new roads of opportunity to improve customer centricity using their influence and insight. This is a must-have for any customer analytics program to succeed.
2. Know your use cases going in and have an urgency to get them done. Have a roadmap that is defined from the customer touchpoints backward as H&R Block, and Telefónica Chile did. Overcome the analysis paralysis that slows down roadmaps from becoming a reality in larger enterprises by staying focused on customer outcomes and capturing retention, loyalty and revenue outcomes as fast as you can in an initial pilot.
3. Rewiring data to support only the customer vision and journey is the best place to start, which is where a C-level executive can move mountains fast for results. The study references the impressive results Telefónica Chile is attaining by showing how they stayed true to their original vision of enriching every customer touchpoint with valuable data. Those enterprises who are truly strong at being customer-centric have systems that reflect the reality of their customers today and their preferences tomorrow and are using analytics to chart a course of retention and revenue growth.
4. Test and test again for usability and resolve to be the best analytics app in your enterprise, ever. Often the most impassioned evangelists for analytics and customer-driven change are C-level execs and VPs who have been asking for customer analytics for years, only to find incomplete data from legacy systems designed for business models long gone is all that’s available. Excel at usability and many problems including getting more sales, marketing, and services teams to use the analytics insights disappear.
5. Always focus on personalization at scale starting from customer touchpoints back. This is the secret to H&R Block’s exceptional success with customer analytics as is how Telefónica Chile is successfully using customer analytics today.
6. Instead of forever chasing the mirage of technological leadership more enterprises need to come to the knowledge oasis of Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Product. It is surprising how large-scale enterprises chase the mirage of technological leadership when building software is not in their DNA, yet banking, retailing and telecommunications companies continue down this path. Innovating around the customer using data from products thanks to sensor & IoT technologies and usage stats from cloud-based apps (Voice of the Product) and Voice of the Customer programs are how market leaders course-correct roadmaps and continue growing retention, loyalty, and revenues relying on analytics to deliver new, valuable insights.’

For additional details on the methodology, please see page 12 of the study which is available for download here (PDF, 16 pp., opt-in, free).

All of your tools, from your online branding to your employee training, are used to engage and connect with your customers in hopes to provide a seamless customer experience for your customers. BARE solutions are aggregated into one platform, giving insights on how your platforms, from your brick and mortar locations to your Yelp page and more, are working together to create a seamless customer experience. Explore our services.

Read the full article at the source here.

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