Forrester Blogs › Marketing & Strategy › Customer Insights Professionals

Are You a Data Hoarder? We’re Betting So.

Posted by Fatemeh Khatibloo on May 10, 2013

Fatemeh Khatibloo

As an analyst on Forrester's Customer Insight's team, I spend a lot of time counseling clients on best-practice customer data usage strategies. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there is no such thing as a 360-degree view of the customer.

Here's the cold, hard truth: you can't possibly expect to know your customer, no matter how much data you have, if all of that data 1) is about her transactions with YOU and you 2) is hoarded away from your partners. And this isn't just about customer data either -- it's about product data, operational data, and even cultural-environmental data. As our customers become more sophisticated and collaborative with each other ("perpetually connected"), so organizations must do the same. That means sharing data, creating collaborative insight, and becoming willing participants in open data marketplaces. 

Now, why should you care? Isn't it kind of risky to share your hard-won data? And isn't the data you have enough to delight your customers today? Sure, it might be. But I'd put money on the fact that it won't be for long, because digital disruptors are out there shaking up the foundations of insight and analytics, customer experience, and process improvement in big ways. Let me give you a couple of examples:

Read more

Categories:

Where To Find Our Consumer Product Strategy Analysts

Posted by Carlton Doty on May 9, 2013

Carlton Doty

First and foremost, I want to take this opportunity to thank our loyal readers of Forrester’s Consumer Product Strategy (CPS) blog. This will be the final post for the CPS blog, but never fear, future posts from your favorite analysts will still appear on both their individual analyst blogs, and the new role blogs to which they have moved. For more detail on this change and where specific analysts will be, keep reading.

Effective April 29, Forrester streamlined how we create and deliver value from 9 roles to 6. The goal of this change is simple — be more clear and distinct in how we define the roles we serve so you can get more value from the role research that fits you best. For the purpose of this post, I want to ensure that you can: 1) ascertain which of the roles is in fact the best fit for your needs; and 2) find your favorite analysts from the old CPS team.

As of April 29 we now have these 6 Marketing & Strategy roles from which you can pick:

1.    Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) – this is where you can find James McQuivey, PhD.

2.    Customer Experience – this is where you can find Tony Costa.

3.    Marketing Leadership – this is where you can find Sarah Rotman Epps and Thomas Husson.

Read more

Now Live: The Cross-Channel Attribution Playbook

Posted by Tina Moffett on May 1, 2013

Tina Moffett

Cross-channel attribution. For customer insights and marketing practitioners, attribution is a white hot measurement topic. It’s viewed as the best way to measure effectiveness of marketing and media campaigns; a way for firms to assess…truly assess… the value of the customer journey.  For the past 18 months, I have been living and breathing this topic and today I am happy….no, I’m elated…to announce the official publication of the Cross-Channel Attribution Playbook.

What’s a playbook, you ask?  Well, a playbook is a framework to help organizations develop expertise around a specific business topic.  The Cross-Channel Attribution Playbook helps marketers and customer insights professionals to take strategic steps in building an attribution strategy within their organization.  It includes 12 chapters, including an executive overview, which covers different aspects of developing and managing a cross-channel attribution measurement framework.  The four “chapters” specifically help organizations:

Read more

Categories:

Siebel & Eloqua: Can You Outrun Your Future?

Posted by Rob Brosnan on April 25, 2013

Rob Brosnan

"Logan: That's the way things are. The way things have always been."

In Redwood City this week, the answer I heard from Oracle was an emphatic yes. At Oracle's Industry Analyst World, the company stressed its cloud bonafides against Salesforce, IBM, and SAP with its new Customer Experience (CX) Suite. The CX Suite is a horizontal offering, assembled primarily from acquisitions, newly rechristened as Oracle Marketing (Eloqua), Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire).

The Software as a Service (SaaS) suite promises to deliver a lower total cost of ownership, easier integration, and faster time to value for a business looking to streamline its enterprise software providers. While Oracle's approach is to lead with SaaS, it also promotes an Enhance, Augment, Migrate strategy, enabling existing customers to extend an on-premises deployment --- think Siebel Loyalty --- with one or more CX products, say Eloqua's email delivery capabilities.

You Can Outrun Your Past

So what does it mean for Eloqua? Marketers using or considering Eloqua should recognize that Oracle:

Read more

Categories:

Find Your Insights Silver Lining With The Customer Analytics Playbook

Posted by Srividya Sridharan on April 24, 2013

Srividya Sridharan

 

The deluge of customer data shows no signs of abating. The perpetually-connected customer leaves data footprints in every interaction with a brand. This presents tremendous opportunities for customer insights professionals and analytics practitioners tasked with analyzing this data, to not only get smarter about customers but ensure that the insights get appropriately used at the point of customer interaction.

When we asked customer analytics users about the challenges and drivers of customer analytics adoption, we found that data integration and data quality continue to inhibit better adoption of customer analytics while users still want to use analytics to improve the data-driven focus of the organization and drive satisfaction and customer retention.

 

Forrester’s Customer Analytics Playbook guides customer insights professionals, marketing scientists and customer analytics practitioners into this new reality of customer data and helps discover analytics opportunities, plan for greater sophistication, take steps towards building a customer analytics capability and continually monitor progress of analytics initiatives. It will include 12 chapters (and an executive overview) that cover different aspects of customer analytics.

Read more

Categories:

Are You Listening To Your Customers?

Posted by Dave Frankland on March 13, 2013

Dave Frankland

Recent shakeups on Forrester’s Customer Intelligence team provided an opportunity to take a good look at our listening platform and social intelligence coverage. Long tagged as the responsibility of the social media team, we believe that “customer listening” should encompass numerous sources of feedback – from the call center, to voice of customer programs, to enterprise feedback management, to ethnographic and traditional market research – to really listen to the customer. CI researcher Allison Smith and I are working on a new series of reports around this concept – for now we're calling it Enterprise Customer Listening.

What is Enterprise Customer Listening, and why do we need it?
 
The Age Of The Customer makes it more important than ever to keep close tabs on what your customers and prospects are saying about your brand. As companies progress toward social intelligence maturity – full integration of social data into existing business strategies and technologies – many are checking the "listening" box, but we think that they aren't thinking broadly enough. The opportunity to listen to customers isn't limited to a single channel, and the unsolicited, unstructured feedback in each channel becomes more valuable when coupled with insights from others. Capturing, managing, and understanding the breadth of what customer's say can ignite the customer’s influence across the enterprise – giving you competitive advantage.
 
So, what do you think?
 
Read more

Cross-Channel Measurement to Assess the Perpetually Connected Customer

Posted by Tina Moffett on March 8, 2013

Tina Moffett

The analytics community is experiencing a rebirth. A renewal. A renaissance. Why? Data is bursting from every corner, from every device, allowing brands to deliver relevant messages and offers to its customers. So, being an analytics connoisseur is important now more than ever. I mean, who else is going to play with all this data . . . and actually enjoy it?

Organizations must develop relevant marketing strategies across devices -- to different customers -- and have the advanced measurement and analytic frameworks to fuel decisions. And the perpetually connected customer is forcing organizations to act quickly, so near-real-time insights are paramount. My past research addresses this, specifically, how analytics professionals can use attribution as a way to understand the true value of each interaction point. This is even more complex because of the increase in cross-device usage.  As a result,analytic pros are using savvy ways to connect information and to measure cross-device impact and incremental value.

Read more

Categories:

Move Beyond The Campaign

Posted by Rob Brosnan on February 22, 2013

Rob Brosnan

Standing in an aisle of a big box retailer, I bought a new electric shaver from a competing retailer’s online store. The store’s shaving display reminded me that my razor was dying. Not knowing which to choose, I twitched for my iPhone, scanned a barcode, read several reviews, explored competing products, found the best price, and ordered it with free shipping. I saved $75 over the same model I could have purchased then and there.

My example is commonplace today. Perpetually connected customers – 42% of US online adults and 37% in Europe – can engage brands at any place, any time, and at any velocity. The technology trends that lead retailers to worry about showrooming touch every industry. Each brand must anticipate connected customers’ demand for information, reviews, and engagement. They must realign technology, processes, and talent to recognize customers in microseconds, using real-time signals to predict their needs and paths to purchase. And they must see that this problem can’t be solved with faster technology alone.

Read more

Categories:

Sometimes, The Elephant In The Room Is Meant To Be There!

Posted by Dave Frankland on February 14, 2013

Dave Frankland
After we packed up the kids and drove three hours to Disney World in Orlando, I sat up until almost 2 o'clock this morning reading the media coverage about Disney's soon-to-be-launched Next Generation Experience. While the blogosphere has been muttering about this reported billion-dollar initiative for a few years, the story took off early this year when the NY Times announced its impending launch. Unfortunately, most of the media coverage centered on the proverbial elephant in the room -- privacy. Congressman Ed Markey exemplified the kneejerk reaction, demanding Disney CEO Bob Iger answer questions that were already addressed in the company's FAQs. If we were in Ireland or England, I'd say that Congressman Markey was taking the mickey!
 
 
Read more

Categories:

Calling All Loyalty Program Marketers: Take Our 2013 Customer Loyalty Program Benchmark Survey

Posted by Emily Collins on February 6, 2013

Emily Collins

Do you manage or make decisions about your company's customer loyalty program? If so, we want to hear from you. We're teaming up with Loyalty360, The Loyalty Marketers Association, to investigate loyalty program size, organization, performance, strategies, and challenges. Take our 2013 Customer Loyalty Program Benchmark survey, and we'll send you complimentary a copy of the resulting research.

Take the customer loyalty benchmark survey

You can use the survey results to:

  • Spot trends and see best practices to incorporate into your loyalty strategy. 
  • Compare your program performance, spend levels, and loyalty technology adoption to those of other loyalty marketing professionals. 
  • Provide justification for a business case in your 2013 loyalty road map. 

The survey will close on Friday, February 15, and the completed research report will publish later this spring. I will also present the findings in a free Webinar and in advisory sessions to interested clients.

Take the customer loyalty benchmark survey 

Please share this blog post and survey link with friends and colleagues who share an interest in customer loyalty programs. Thanks in advance for your involvement!

Categories:

Syndicate content