Blog: customer data
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Use Analytics for Good, Not Evil...
5/2/12Continue Reading...or, what I learned at Forrester's Customer Intelligence Forum this year.
I'm sure by now you've seen the New York Times piece on Target and the power of analytics; you know, the one that describes how the mega retailer knew a 16-year-old girl was
pregnant - and sent her targeted offers related to all things baby - before her father even knew? Or perhaps you saw Stephen Colbert's take on the subject?Finished with the piece? Then stay for a moment and let's focus on the warning for marketers offered by this entertaining, but still alarming article: customer analytics can be a slippery slope. Sure, customer data can be mined sixteen ways to Sunday to deliver rich insights that predict what people will buy and when, thus helping marketers deliver relevant, timely offers that grow customer value. That's what Target did quite well. But does it start to border on Big Brother? Consumers believe it does.
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Customer Value Management - ValueWatcher
7/8/11Continue ReadingDuring the next few months, you'll hear (and see) me talk about ValueWatcher, a highly intuitive (and interactive) visualization application that puts customer data in the hands of business users to gain a better understanding of customers and glean insights in a self-sufficient manner.
Why? Because our clients have adopted and embraced this tool in ways we never imagined possible. While not a substitute for a campaign management or business intelligence application, ValueWatcher has become the perfect complement. It allows those individuals who are not power users - and have no desire to be - the ability to query their customer data quickly and easily.
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Avoiding Analysis Paralysis
5/10/10Continue ReadingIn a previous post I discussed the need to purge customer data stores with customer data we are not using. Even after this de-cluttering exercise you may still find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of data that you have at your disposal. As a result you may find yourself in an ongoing cycle of analyzing and reporting out on the same data in an attempt to derive new insights, but to no avail. Rather than taking an open-ended approach hoping to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, I suggest you borrow a page from science and take a more hypothesis driven approach.
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Data, Data, Everywhere Nor Any Drop of Insight
4/23/10Continue ReadingOK, so it’s not quite as catchy as the line from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner but it describes a problem many of us marketers are facing these days. With the proliferation of interactive technology and a significant decrease in the costs of storage, many marketers have become customer data hoarders. As such, many of us are having a hard time finding that favorite “customer insight sweater” in a closet overflowing with customer data. I suggest we all embark on some spring cleaning of our customer data to make sure we are deriving as much value from it as we should be.
