In my last blog post, titled Taking the Best Marketing Action, we focused on making sure our marketing activities were relevant, optimized, and automated. Getting to this place within your marketing organization takes work, but the payoffs from having these processes set are phenomenal in terms of efficiency. SAS Customer Intelligence provides solutions to help achieve marketing relevancy, optimization, and automation.
Today, we want to look at our third and final Customer Intelligence customer issue, maximizing cross business impact. What does “maximizing cross business impact” mean and how do we achieve this cross business impact? Maximizing cross business impact involves taking the information that marketing gleans from customer interactions and dispersing it across all departments of the organization. For instance – if marketing learns through campaign execution that a certain customer segment only desires to receive offers via the SMS channel – it can relay information to tech support or billing to only contact a customer of that segment via the SMS channel. These other departments would not have been aware of this customer preference if not for marketing. A very simple, but real and relevant example, of how knowing your customer and then spread that information “cross business” benefits the entire organization.
We now get to the question of how to maximize this cross business impact. I propose that this is done by focusing on three things - reporting, recording, and repeatability.
Reporting is all about surfacing insight gained. Whether it be through key performance indicators, executive dashboards, or a combination of canned and custom reports – reporting is essential. However, creating reports that provide insight is only half the battle – these reports must be available so that they can be accessed and used across business units. Reporting that only lives inside of the marketing department doesn’t help other business units improve. Being able to track, measure and share reporting results across all channels and business units is essential.
Creating decisions based on data and insight is something that just makes sense. Recording, to that end, is an essential element in maximizing cross business impact. Being able to record and quantity financial impacts of marketing decisions, being able to record and leverage customer contact history, and being able to review response history – are all important components in maximizing impact. If you don’t have the data – it’s hard to take what you have learned and continually refine it for better decision making. Recording what we learn and creating a consolidated view of our customer is the ideal end state. Using that single customer view to make all business decisions across all channels is possible with the creation of this real time single view and a common business analytics framework serving as the backbone to the operation.
Repeatability, or being able to deliver a consistent cross channel experience, is the third main component of maximizing cross business impact. Repeatability includes a few things – from a marketing and customer perspective. Marketing wise – you want to be able to rely on your consolidated single view of the customer across all marketing functions. Being able to repeatedly access and rely on that information will allow you to deliver a consistent experience to your customer. Customer wise - this consistent experience will delight your customer, as they will know what to expect from you as a company. Sharing this single view across your organization will allow other departments to leverage your customer knowledge repeatedly when interacting with the customer. For example, if tech support knows about your browsing and purchase history when you call in to address a product concern, they will know of your attempts to find information, as well as your possible frustration level. Knowing this allows them to alter their interaction with you as a customer. The ability to repeatedly and consistently adapt to a customer will affect customer service satisfaction levels.
Maximizing cross business impact involves reporting on insight gained, recording that insight for future use, and repeating the act of accessing and using customer data to deliver the best customer experience that you can as a company.
Well that’s it – the three main customer issues that SAS Customer Intelligence solutions address. The great thing about these three things – finding the most profitable growth opportunities, taking the best marketing action, and maximizing cross business impact - is that they can be implemented incrementally. And in the end, once you have a grasp on all three of these issues, you will be able to perform them in a closed loop of sorts, continually refining each issue as you address it again. Good luck, and let us know how we can help!
