How can you find and act on information hidden in customer interactions? How can you use this information to create profitable results and create a consistent customer experience? It’s not just about sales and marketing teams interacting with the customers anymore. The entire organization must align drive a good, consistent experience.

In one of my favorite sessions of the day yesterday at and the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference, the following panel participants discussed these and other topics:

• Nelle Schantz, Sr. Marketing Director, Program Management, SAS (Moderator)
• Tom Davenport, Professor and Author “Competing on Analytics” and “Analytics at Work”
• Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group
• Rom Hendler, SVP and CMO, Las Vegas Sands Corp

Becky actually provided a good overview of this panel in an earlier post, but I enjoyed the discussion so much that I wanted to capture as much of it here as I could.

Nelle: If we’re analyzing marketing programs or sales initiatives, can you give an example of a company that you think does this really well? How can companies do this to see the impact quickly on customers or on the bottom line with real dollars?

• Tom: It’s hard. If it wasn’t, more people would do it well. Most people do it badly. One that does it well is RBC (Royal Bank of Canada). They determine their share of wallet, and employ a segmentation scheme. They understand what it costs to serve customers through various channels and what those customers are worth. They encourage customers to utilize a particular channel.
• Charlene: It can be a transformation of culture. Dell is a good example; they have lots of good customer data. Back in 2005, remember Dell Hell? They started to use the data to see what to fix and they set up a center of excellence (CoE) around monitoring customer feedback. But the knowledge can’t just reside in that CoE – knowledge needs be sent out to all the areas that need that information to change the business and provide a better customer experience. CEO Michael Dell sets the leadership direction on how quickly customer issues need to be addressed. The worst thing you can do is not listen to your customers.
• Nelle: Rom, what work have you done at Las Vegas Sands to impact customer experience?
• Rom: We’re doing a lot of things. We consider ourselves in the “integrated resort business.” We’re not just a casino because we have all this other stuff. Sometimes the casino is the biggest revenue generator for a property, but in some areas it’s not – it’s a complicated business. Traditionally we tracked the gamers: We trained the customers to get a card and get freebies and we monitored what the customer was doing, but we tended to not look at the overall value and activity of the customer, across all of our segments (show, spa, dining, etc.). We know that the really good customers also gamble and you may get some of them to sign up for your card.

Nelle: We want to make good fact-based decisions, but we have trouble getting information in the hands of decision makers. What are the obstacles in getting the info to those people?

• Rom: My far biggest challenges involve IT. Our first challenge is collecting the data. We use our customer loyalty program to collect data about the customers. Our other biggest challenge is that there is a lot of technology out there, but knitting it together is difficult – lots of what we offer to customers is outsourced (shows and venues, for example). It’s complicated to put all the systems together and deploy technology to bring them together. We have the vision, strategy and technology, but deploying it in a timely way is a challenge.
• Tom: IT can be a barrier – but I come across companies that do it really well. IT and business analytic teams need to be joined at the hip. The best companies overlap in skills between IT and business analytics. If the relationships between the groups are bad, it will hold you back.
• Charlene: It’s the changing role of IT leader. They’re not just running the systems, they’re truly a business partner.
• Rom: IT is so big and the organization is fast growing; there is so much pressure in keeping on the lights, but also to innovate and open new properties. We need to balance our customer analytic initiatives against all of the other operational technology projects.
• Charlene: Organizations need a strategy around how analytics fit in with all the other priorities. We can only do certain things with time and resources; the strategy is important in defining the most impactful projects. It’s important to change the organizational culture; it’s about getting everyone on board.
• Rom: We do a great job at analytics. The problem is moving analytics to the next level, pushing in real time to the customer through the right channel (web, call center). We try to touch the customer at the right time to extend play in our casinos, but deployment of that can be difficult.

Audience Question: With all of this customer data, what about the collision between analytics and privacy?

• Charlene: If we focus on social media, personal information is open across platform. It’s a question of privacy versus permissions. People will give so much information away just to get something – but it’s about the level of trust that person has with the organization. We’ve found that about only 25% of people super-concerned (with privacy issues). If you think about it Facebook is in real-time: All people interactions have an immediate impact
• Tom: The Wall Street Journal has written a number of articles about online privacy: Is there an offline world of customer privacy issues? Nobody writes about that – companies have been targeting customers through direct mail and other channels for the past 30 years or so.
• Charlene: Your mobile device puts out so much information – there’s so much companies can do with this – the places where I shop know me before I check out.
• Nelle: Are there enough options in place for consumers to protect themselves?
• Charlene: Most organizations are extremely cautious because nobody wants bad press.
• Tom: Mobility can blow the top off of this whole (privacy) thing. We don’t have a very high privacy threshold in this country. At Harrah’s, for example – they know so much about you – and they say there’s been no breach of confidentiality.
• Rom: We would like to get to a place where we’re not using a card, for example there is camera technology that can recognize you? Also, an key industry metric is householding, but in our industry not all of our customers want to be householded. There’s an evolution of the customer and technology, and we must be stewards of the customer data and use it appropriately.

Nelle: What are some best practices for customer experience?

• Tom: One approach is to start combining functions like marketing and operations – you can’t do marketing without influencing operations. We’re going to see more of these combinations.
• Rom: The role of the CMO is changing – combining with COO. One of the areas we took over was the call center – need to hold people accountable and make sure they understand the strategy at all levels (for example, why we were changing rates). They need to understand how the analytics are driving changes in operations. When it wasn’t aligned, we couldn’t get the operational groups to make the changes. Traditionally, in the past CMOs came from creative areas, not from analytic backgrounds. Taking data and doing something with it – it’s a different type of creativity. I like to look at data and see how we can use it in a creative way; I want to be sure that we control the customer experience.
• Charlene: It’s about the democratizing of analytics; it’s about taking info that’s already there and make your front line people more in tune with how they can have an impact on the customer experience through the execution of that insight – it’s the front line that needs that information and they need to believe in it.