Is Customer Intelligence Delivering Results?

I have just read a very interesting blog posting by George Hollister, (someone who I value, listen to and enjoy following on Twitter) where a recent study, "CI Teams: Blocking and Tackling is Not Enough" carried out by Forrester suggested businesses were failing to get valuable insight from the Customer Insight (CI) team as they were focusing on Data Integration rather than gleaning insights from the platform. It is a message I heard all the time in my Web Analytics days...

The blog (and study) goes on to suggest Web Analytics is a platform being used to glean such insights, and to me at least, there in lies the problem! Web Analytics platforms are not CI focused, typically run as a SaaS model and are therefore a) costly to export, b) time consuming to extract data into a EDW whereby analysts can really use it, c) it is aggregated!


The blog (and Forrester study) goes on to suggest the problem does not lie with the CI team themselves, or Data Integration but in fact an it is an Organisational Integration problem. Yet again, disparate data silos is the problem! Data that is needed in one silo is 'unavailable', causing delays in being able to glean insight, making it difficult for the marketing analytics or CI team (who are usually located in another business unit, building, city, country...) to include the data, resulting in reduced insights from increasing efforts - all in all, producing far from eye watering results!

To fully empower the CI team, businesses need a platform that delivers insight in a contextualised manner and at a non-aggregated level into an EDW within seconds of the event occurring. Preferably with a platform that is tag-free too! (who needs or wants the pain, time delays and cost of identifying and deploying tags to then build charts and graphs from?). As I understand it, most Web Analytics platforms struggle to populate EDW's in less than 72 hours... Hardly 'realtime'...

I know customers who have done just this and with a CI team to hand have experienced significant benefits in doing so (have shifted them to be a leader in their game in online commerce).

Realtime delivers results; not just in promoting the right message at the right time to the right prospect, but also in getting valuable insights delivered to analysts in all business units, in all departments, in all office buildings and in all cities/countries to glean actionable and relevant insights from to achieve (and most often exceed) their primary (and often secondary) business goals in a very short space of time.

Heard it all before...

Again, I have read another article which suggests traditional visitor insight platforms are capable of providing detailed and actionable insight on the behaviors exhibited by people like you and I on their web site(s). They articulate it in a way that fools you into believing they can actually do it - I challenge anyone to show me a working example?

I hate to say it, but it's all tosh! They cannot get to the low level of visitor insight and I can vouch for that having used most of the leading platforms in the business today. IF (and that's a BIG IF) they can/could get to low level visitor insight, what can they do with it in realtime? Surely, any organisation that wants low level visitor insight wants it to do something with it other than build pretty charts and graphs?
What if you could promote complementary/cross-sell products based on a previous purchase? Or, perhaps proactively let someone know via SMS that their car MOT is due for renewal (before it expires!)? Or, maybe deliver to them a personalised message/offer based around their sentiment on posts in Facebook or Twitter? Perhaps they dislike your prices (and they are a high value, existing customer?) so they have told the world about a deal they got with a competitor? Surely you don't want to lose low risk, high value customers? If you didn't know, it costs approximately 6-7 times more money to re-market a lost customer than it does a brand new customer...

When we live and talk about making cost cuts, why do we never really consider where we can make significant savings on the web rather than throw our money at prospects who will never buy, unlikely to buy or as in the home utilities markets (such as Electricity, Gas or Water suppliers) have bought in to a story/vision but then had such a bad experience they left? We need to know who these people are, in advance and preferably before they leave without buying or have bought and don't buy again through poor performance on 'our part'? The problem, from my own experience, is these companies factor 'defective traits' into their business models. What if, for once, they didn't and it was increasingly important to every energy company to keep hold of an existing customer. What might that mean to wholesale energy prices? What would that mean in fiscal terms to our household bills?

At the end of the day, to do any of the above you need low level, realtime visitor insight. Such platforms exist today but they are not your traditional insight platforms. You might also be surprised to learn the time to data and insight using such platforms is VERY short - a few weeks versus a few months/years/never?

In my humble experience (15years+), I'm yet to see a traditional insight platform deliver such insight to an organisation which yields such significant insights, revenue, customer retention, increase loyalty and more.

I will happily 'eat my hat' if I'm proven wrong (so please show me what I'm missing, if anything?).

Can you bend technology too far?

I hear it all the time. I need this tool to deliver this, that tool to deliver that then a year or few later, they retire to the fact that the technology will never be capable of delivering on a 'false promise'. It didn't stop the vendor selling the software and happily taking Mr Customers money though, did it!

So, perhaps we are now living in an era where there really is no-one platform that is capable of providing a definitive business platform. After all, I'm sure (like me) you have worked on projects where horrendous amounts of time have been spent (as well as money!!) to deliver on 'false-promises'. Add up the amount of money spent, then work out the ROI on that spent cash! I bet its not as good as you were hoping for, huh?

I find myself speaking more and more to businesses that can and do provide a solution to address the modern day business pains, but it's not by using one business reporting platform. Businesses need to consider what it is they need/want to deliver and then work out what they need to deliver it.

For example (and speaking from an Analysts point of view), I might need full, rich data from every data silo, including the search platform, telephone/ivr platform, email platform, web platform, marketing attribution platform and more. In fact, the more data I have, the better an Analyst I can be and the better the insight I can provide! I need BigData then! Problem with 'BigData' is it can sometimes be too much!
So, I need a Business Intelligence platform that can handle BigData; one that is with me at all times, not just restricted to the desktop and one which is scale-able and quick to deploy (and one which won't hurt the budget!!).

So, which vendors make claims to be able to do all this today? I know a few and I also know a few end-users who have a lot to say about a vendors inability to deliver on the promise, now known to me as the 'false-promise'. And that's after a VERY EXTENSIVE tagging discussion, time consuming and detailed documentation and testing processes... I really believe businesses are tired of tagging everything they want insight on. There are alternatives, Atomic Labs with their PION platform or Celebrus Technologies spring to mind - both working very differently but neither requiring 'tags'.

Disparate data needs to come together, I appreciate that. If you think back a few years ago, this was a big problem with such badly fragmented data, however now platforms exist which can 'power customer data hubs' and I can speak from 15 years experience, that these platforms ARE delivering a step change within organisations, are winning awards and and delivering on the promise (with customers shouting about their successes - how many have done that before?!).

Perhaps now then businesses need to step back a bit and take a look at their infrastructure, where they want to be, how they plan to get there and the value to the business on getting there sooner. Cloud based storage is now cheap enough, fast enough, efficient and secure enough to become a possible hosting platform for most types of business, business platforms can feed into 'the cloud', tag-free platforms exist, cost effective BI exists, individual visitor level tracking exists, real-time communication exists... Need I go on?