By Deepak Advani, IBM
To many marketers, the customer is a puzzle.
You have snippets of detail: maybe you have a corner piece that sheds some information on where they live, while a middle piece tells you what part of your web site they frequent most. That’s a start, but if the analysis ends there, what you are left with is an abstract. The picture may look good hanging on a wall, but it does not allow brands to present their customers with the personalized experiences they demand.
Right now people all over the globe are online sharing information with brands. They're using their smartphones to check into stores, walking around a store with their tablets, researching potential purchases or clicking on an email campaign, which is offering a 50 percent discount on their favorite brand of shoes. Regardless of the channel, the one thing they demand is understanding -- they want brands to know a little about who they are, what they want, when and where they want it.
Here’s the challenge. Just this week I was just looking at an infographic put out by Domo team. The graphic says that the global internet population grew 14.3 percent from 2011 - 2013 and now presents 2.4 billion people. That’s a staggering number. Now think about how much data those 2.4 billion people are creating.
Could it be too much?
According to Econsultancy, four out of every five customers say that brands don’t know them as an individual. One source of this figure could be that this massive deluge of information that’s pouring down on them has become too much to manage.
But if the forecast is calling for a heavy dose of analytics, a marketer needs to start connecting these puzzle pieces that are coming at them from a myriad of sources. For example, what if a clothing retailer identifies a troubling trend on their web site? Specifically, that a growing number of customers are spending significant time on their site, but are leaving without making a purchase. Why is this happening and how do you fix the problem?
If you cannot harness the data, you may never know.
However, using behavioral analytics, a customer service team can follow a customer’s actual journey and examine their behavior on the site as they move from one page to the next. In doing so, they identify one particular page that has several interactive videos designed to show off a new line of shoes. After looking more closely, they realize the videos take too long to load and don't show well on smartphones or tablets. These are the reason that customers are leaving the site empty handed. Now that’s how you put data to work to fix the problems.
With predictive and cognitive analytics, you could provide in-store associates with instant product information, customer loyalty data, sales histories, user reviews, blogs and magazines. So that when a customer walks up with a question, associates know exactly how to help the customers. Or when browsing a clothing site, the retailer could instantly look up items you recently purchased or showed interest in and then present recommendations based on the consumer’s unique taste and styles, which will complement their existing wardrobe.
Brands today have the opportunity to begin turning the pieces of the customer puzzle into better, more personalized experiences. Using analytics you now have the ability to deliver exceptional experiences, which is the key to building advocacy. And advocacy will increasingly become the difference between winning and losing.
Deepak Advani is General Manager of IBM Commerce.
There is a new way to work, and it's made with IBM. Learn more at ibm.com/ibmthink or join the conversation at #MadeWithIBM
