Customer Relationships: From Insight to Multi-Channel

By Shalini Raghavan

Multi-channel, omnichannel … stereophonic.  Simply put, marketers are looking to reach customers in whatever way is most appropriate.  This could mean a store, a website, a catalogue, email, text, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn... But a major challenge is the disconnect between insight and action. In January we released the results of a survey that showed that for most companies this disconnect is about three months … 10 to 12 weeks too long!

In building customer relationships that span multiple channels, time is of the essence. Have you ever come back from a vacation, and find that you are still getting offers for the Holiday you just took? Where were these folks two months ago when you were planning that trip?

Once you determine how to answer your million dollar marketing questions, it must be output in an immediately executable form. Generally this is in the form of a “decision tree” of business rules. But unlike rules that have been authored by marketers based on empirical evidence and judgment, these rules are packed with data-drive customer intelligence. As a result when they trigger a response to a customer behavior, that response has been shaped by deep customer insight.

Decision trees can be imported directly into rules-driven operational systems. Or they can be implemented into business rules management systems, which simultaneously perform decisioning as a service for any number of operational systems – including real-time dynamic generation of optimized treatments during interactions with customers.

The goal is to move from insight to multi-channel action while the message is still relevant. Marketers should prioritize decision automation technology in 2013. This will enable them to react faster to customer life-changes (such as a marriage, a new job, or the birth of a child), increase profitability, make better decisions, and increase customer relevance. If marketers can figure this out, they will be rewarded with an unbeatable overall customer experience that helps them rise to the top.

For more information on this topic, check out our Insights paper (registration required).