Where’s My Magic 8 Ball? Customer-Focused Analytics

Published October 12, 2013   |   
Julie Hunt

Your customers know that they have handed you a lot of their personal information through a variety of interactions and channels. And your customers fully expect that your company has done its job and processed all that information to know what they want, how to give them excellent customer service and streamline doing business with you.

Your customers know that they have handed you a lot of their personal information through a variety of interactions and channels. And your customers fully expect that your company has done its job and processed all that information to know what they want, how to give them excellent customer service and streamline doing business with you.

Customers don’t really care that you need to work through heaps of data to continuously update your customer intelligence. Customers only want you to shake the Magic 8 ball and have the right answer pop up. If the wrong answer materializes, customers know you aren’t taking advantage of their information. Customers quickly conclude that you haven’t bothered to get to know them, meaning you really don’t care about them.

But you should care — and how you interact with your customers should show it.

From Big Data Analytics to Relevant Customer Intelligence

Surprise! — big data analytics is not a Magic 8 ball that you can just shake for the answers. Indeed, it would take a lot of different “big data” Magic 8 balls – testing, experimentation, creating different analytical and data models – to reach insight from the analytics.

Big data comes in many shapes and sizes; all kinds of big data sources can have value for marketing and sales. Besides social media and eCommerce data, sources such as machine-generated data (sensors, GPS and location, automated operational and digital networks) point to interesting possibilities. But it takes time and resources to explore and amplify those possibilities.

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