Trends and Outliers
TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog
Category Archives: Customer Relationship Management
2013
Analytics Adds Personality to the Customer Experience
Companies amass a ton of information about their customers’ behaviors, preferences, and interests through data that’s gathered from customer interactions in various channels.
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Whether a customer is browsing a company’s product pages to gather information about a product or she engages in a chat discussion with an agent about a service issue, companies can use this information with analytics to gain a richer understanding of each customer and to better tailor offers, messaging, services, and products for them.
2013
3 Ways Analytics Boost Traditional Retailers’ CRM Strategies
To reach customers where they live, so to speak, traditional retailers should take a peek at what their pure-play e-commerce brethren are doing – incorporating analytics into their CRM (customer relationship management) strategies to ensure profitable relationships with their customers.
For brick-and-mortar retailers, big data analytics solutions are not just “nice-to-have” – they’re absolutely critical to the success of their CRM operations, according to an article in Direct Marketing News.
“CRM at tier-one retailers has not been about managing the customer relationship, it has been about offers,” says Bob Hetu, research director for retail at Gartner Inc. “They have to get beyond their prejudices, one channel over another. What paths to purchase customers take doesn’t matter. You have [to] support them in whatever way they choose to shop with you.”
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2013
Predictive Analytics to Head Off Retail Disaster
Had ousted J.C. Penney CEO, Ron Johnson, figured out a way to give customers what they wanted – a stellar in-store experience – he might still be at the helm of the brick-and-mortar retail giant.
But Johnson didn’t give customers what they wanted, he gave them what he thought they wanted, causing them to abandon the sinking retail ship in droves, and costing him his job.
The lesson to be learned from the J.C. Penney debacle is that to survive, brick-and-mortar retailers must create in-store customer experiences that set them apart from their online competitors – or face extinction, according to an article in Forbes.
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2013
Applying Analytics to Retain, Attract Telco Customers
The fact is telecommunications customers are constantly getting bombarded with offers to switch providers. Not only that but customers are also becoming more involved in service/price comparisons.
That’s why it’s more important than ever for business leaders of wireless providers to use analytics to identify the right offers and price points for services and features to attract and retain the most high-value customers.
The use of predictive analytics by telecommunications and other companies to identify optimal pricing is hardly new, as Accenture notes in a report.
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2013
Video: How Data Visualization Helps Customer Complaint Management
In a recent webcast, Ram Ramachandran (senior manager), Lisa Ducharme (senior manager for customer experience practice) and Jacob Thiel (manager) of Ernst & Young Financial Services, explain how visual data can make customer complaint management more effective.
By leveraging data visualization, a manager or executive can track complaint resolution as well as associate workload and analyze opportunities for service improvement.
In addition to helping the manager improve processes and customer experience, leveraging visual data analytics for customer complaint management decreases costs and offers a much deeper view of the customer relationship.
Ducharme, who specializes in helping banking institutions improve the customer experience, says that these institutions can benefit from better complaint management via visual analytics.
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2013
4 Ways to Use Data Analysis to Pinpoint Customer Intent
Before the rise of the social web, sales and marketing departments were forced to rely on historical sales figures to try to predict how and when customers would pull the purchasing trigger.
Today, customer intent clues are widely available via comments on social networks, previous browsing behavior, email open rates, call center and sales department interactions and past receptiveness to offers and promotions.
But this big data gold mine is spread across multiple channels that often fall outside a company’s internal network landscape. And that means determining customer intent requires data analysis to mine for the insight that can bolster sales.
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2013
3 Ways Financial Analytics Turn Customer Complaints into Positive Opportunities
Bill Gates once said, “ Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
And that’s an area where financial analytics can pay off this year – growth through complaints. It’s a tactic that’s recommended by research from both Ernst and Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Use Data to Fix Bad Experiences
In its annual Experience Radar: 2013, US Retail Banking report, PwC says that banks should “fix the bad first.”
“Two out of five customers shifted business to another bank after a bad experience. Turn issues into opportunities to build loyalty,” one key finding suggests.
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2013
How Financial Analytics Improves the Complaining Customer’s Experience
Customer complaints about mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI) policies by financial institutions in the UK are piling up faster than the independent Financial Ombudsman Service can handle them.
In fact, the service is receiving about 5,000 complaint cases a week and there’s no let up in sight.
The ombudsman, which resolves disputes between customers and financial businesses, expects to receive the same number of new PPI cases every week for the rest of this year and into 2014, according to an article in The Telegraph.
To date, the ombudsman service has hired 1,000 workers to deal with the surge in complaints about the mis-sold PPI policies. And it expects to hire another 1,000 employees in the coming tax year to deal with what the service calls an unprecedented level of complaints.
According to data from the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the UK’s financial services regulatory agency, more than three million consumers have complained to banks and other financial institutions about PPI.
PPI is designed to protect borrowers who find themselves out of work because of sickness or because they’re laid off. However, the policies are often sold to customers who don’t need them along with other financial products like personal loans or credit cards, according to The Telegraph.
To compensate their customers, the UK’s biggest banks have already earmarked over $19.3 billion (£12 billion). Lloyds, which has the most customers of any UK bank, has set aside $8.5 billion (£5.3 billion) to settle customer claims, The Telegraph notes.
“It’s disappointing that we’re still seeing significant numbers of unresolved disputes about mis-sold policies being referred to the ombudsman,” deputy chief ombudsman Tony Boorman says in the article. “Our proposals ensure we have the resource to tackle these record case volumes and the businesses responsible for generating the biggest workload contribute the most to sorting it out.”
The ombudsman expects it will have handled 250,000 new cases relating to the mis-selling of PPI policies between April 2012 and April 2013.
To help pay for the work it has to do, the service is proposing to increase the fees it charges to financial services firms that refer cases to the ombudsman by $81 (£50) to $888 (£550), according to The Telegraph.
It seems that today financial institutions are focusing on the way they treat customers to increase revenue, protect their brands in this world of social networking, and respond to regulatory demands.
However, organization and process design are often developed without consideration for the customer and/or increased regulatory scrutiny.
And this makes it challenging for these financial services firms to provide oversight, analysis, resolution, and reporting of consumer inquiries and complaints.
But financial analytics tools, including a complaints dashboard, can help banks and other financial institutions improve the customer experience as well as the employee experience, operate more efficiently and better respond to inquiries from regulators.
The complaints dashboard integrates data from multiple sources and provides a consolidated view of customer complaints to help financial institutions better develop and/or manage customer complaint processes and capabilities, according to Ernst & Young LLP.
Additionally, the complaints dashboard supports root cause analysis to drive process improvements and reduce the volume of complaints.
In the UK, part of the FSA’s response to customer complaints regarding PPI policies included guidance regarding a “root cause analysis” that it asked relevant financial services firms to undertake to determine, among other things, an assessment of whether customers who had not (yet) brought complaints might also be entitled to compensation, according to the Insurance and Reinsurance Newswire.
A financial analytics tool like a complaints dashboard would have made it easier for these institutions to respond to the FSA’s request.
Next Steps:
- Please join us on January 16th at 2 p.m. EST for our complimentary webcast, “Spotfire Analytics for Customer Complaints.” During this webcast Lisa Ducharme and Jacob Thiel of the Financial Services Office of Ernst & Young LLP will lead an interactive demonstration of a complaints dashboard, using the TIBCO Spotfire analytics platform, to demonstrate how visual analytics assists clients to improve the customer experience, the associate experience, realize operational efficiencies, and respond to regulator inquiries.
2012
Developing a Progressive Data Analysis Strategy
As companies gain more experience with data analysis, they’re able to identify new ways to use data and pinpoint opportunities to improve the business.
This includes the use of data discovery and other techniques to identify the company’s most valuable customers and determine ways to attract more like them.
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Data discovery techniques can help companies identify the right prospects faster and much more affordably. Think about it – enterprise companies often spend millions of dollars each year on sales and marketing campaigns, yet only a fraction of the prospects they target actually convert.
2012
How Data Discovery Can Help Entice Holiday Shoppers on the Fence
One of the biggest challenges retailers face during the holiday shopping season is a trap of their own making.
Many customers have become accustomed to receiving steep discounts on certain pivotal shopping days. This is particularly true with Gray Thursday, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Mobile Tuesday.
As Jack Aaronson notes in a blog post for ClickZ, the concept of “Pavlovian marketing” stems from the notion that companies train customers to shop with them only when they know they’ll receive discounts.
Customers have become so accustomed to receiving markdowns at certain times that they’ll wait to shop until retailers make such bargains available.
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