Demand on the increase for detailed individual insight

It's not news to say 'if you don't have a web site, you're missing out', but what if that conversation became 'if you don't know who is on your web site, you're missing out'?

Numbers these days mean great things when they're tangible. Take for example a bottom line sales number for an online travel agent - sales are down, 50% to this time last year (a worrying thought for those in the travel industry). But why was that? Who influenced that?

If you don't know who or why, how can your online business recover?

Take this scenario, which is typical of a customer insight platform - a visitor (known as ID 12345) arrives on the web site, looks around Summer holidays for 2012 and in particular, focuses on Caribbean cruises worth in excess of £3000. They go away and come back later that evening.
During the day, they phoned the call centre to ask about whether the travel insurance included covered over 65's with existing health complications - bad news, history of cancer rules them out. Deflated, the caller ends the call, but makes further enquiries with another insurance company who WILL cover them. A great result!
They go back on to the web site later that evening, and go to buy the holiday - they enter all their details for the cruise, name, age, address, phone number and more. It is during this process the platform discovers that the traveller is Mary Smith, a long time, loyal customer of the brand. However, the web site doesn't accept their booking due to availability no longer being available.

Consider this in a Customer Insight world - you have all their web browsing history (individual, not aggregated insight), you know they looked for Caribbean and Mediterranean cruises, you know they called in to the call centre and spoke to John Doe on x2233 and you know the message they got during their purchase was 'no availability', so what can your business do for this traveller?

You have a phone number, postal address, email address... Why not follow up via any of those marketing channels to re-engage Mary and show her you care about her business. Offer an alternative cruise and at a discounted price for the inconvenience caused (effectively saving Mary the cost of separate travel insurance).

As a result of this typical customer insight story, the travel company has reinstated it's brand with Mary as a company that cares, Mary still gets her holiday and the travel company still makes some money instead of losing money! All from some simple insight.

Tangible results mean everything. To say a bottom line is trending up, down, static or is +/-xx% doesn't mean much when you want to take action on the information you are presented with.

Use aggregated insight reports to tell you how well or how much you could improve your online business by, but don't try to bend it to do something it was never built to do - provide detailed individual insight. Leave that to a platform that has been doing it for years, has experience and is more cost effective than you might imagine.

If only all online businesses operated this way...

iPhone5 - Why All The Surprises?

Yesterday was an exciting day - Tim Cook, now CEO for the World's richest brand, took to the stage to announce all the great things and gadgets Apple have been working on over the last 12months. Most were widely expecting the announcement of the iPhone5, but as we all now know, that didn't happen.

I've read blogs from others that it was disappointing, no one really cared about the other Apple products, it was afterall the iPhone5 they all wanted. But has anyone thought about the history of Apple since the iPhone 3G came out? Has anyone considered the Worlds richest brand went through an internal re-structuring process to replace an inspirational and truly thought leading CEO, Steve Jobs with Tim Cook?

One thing is for certain though, we can't ignore the sentiment from the public - that knocked 5% off the value of Apple yesterday due to NOT releasing a new iPhone5.

I watched an Apple video a few days back when they were talking about iOS and how iOS is what makes the mobile Apple devices as fantastic as they are today. What is the point to release a new iPhone if the OS is not capable of fully exploiting it yet?

iOS 5 is being released on 12th October - I'm excited! This should make the already great iPhone4 even better - but think back to when the iPhone 3G became the 3GS, a similar pattern occurred. Think about what happened when the iPhone4 was released and how everyone went crazy over how revolutionising it was - if you kind of forget the really bad launch with 'Antennagate'. Now think about just how impressive the iPhone5 could be if it is going to be such a marked improvement over the 4S as the 4 was to the 3GS.

Will I upgrade? I don't know. I like recording my children when we play as a family - will 1080p make me think it's worth the upgrade? Unlikely. Do I care about the 8MP camera when I take pretty good shots with my 5MP in the iPhone4? Not really. Do I care about the increased memory and A5 chip? Maybe; I really fancy using AirPlay mirroring through my Apple TV2. I guess it depends just how well it all takes off.