“The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.”
Arthur C. Nielsen, Founder of AC Nielsen
Illuminating the wants, behaviors, and characteristics of one’s customer base has become among the most common applications of the exploding phenomenon called “Big Data”. Research firm Gartner predicts that the CMO spending in technology will outpact the CIO’s by 2021, fueled in large part by customer analytics initiatives.
Consequentially, there’s been a dizzying array of innovation in recent years. Armed with new technologies like Hadoop, Internet of Things or Real-Time Analytics, businesses have never been better armed in predicting life events with uncanny accuracy, whether parsing human genome information to predict your likelihood of prostate cancer or parsing shopping data to predict the likelihood of you to buy baby monitors. Reading up on the latest trends brings to mind a brave new world where businesses know customers better then they know themselves.
Yet, contrast this against your own experience as a customer. You are inundated with direct mail, email, sponsored posts, cold calls, etc. that more often than not, is tossed directly in the recycling bin, ignored, or hung up on. This reflects a reality that the insights businesses have about their customers, aren’t being reflected in the Billions of dollars spent in direct to consumer marketing.
Why is this? According to eMarketer, there are a number of fundamental challenges inhibiting a more personalized customer experience, including an inability to gain insights quickly enough, not having enough data, and having inaccurate data. And it is only getting worse. As a steady drumbeat of innovations, Web, Email, Search, Mobile, Social, never ends and continues to layer ever more customer touch-points organization have to account for, with each channel managed as a silo.
This means most marketing departments are crippled in their ability to engage their existing customer base in an integrated way, or even understand who their customers are, spending countless dollars to bring in new customers, only to have existing customers leak out of that same funnel. What’s needed is an approach that brings the customer to the center of your operations. If this is a challenge in your organization, we’re here to help.
3Cloud has extensive experience in addressing the 3 strategic imperatives for any organization wanting to transform their businesses into customer-centric organizations:
- SECURE your customer data – We have expertise in unifying and syndicating your data both within your enterprise, as well as transforming it as an asset you can further monetize externally. Talk to us about how we can take your transactional, web, social, and other 3rd party data, and unify it in a responsive, business-driven environment under your control.
- MEASURE your customer data – With services spanning understanding the lifetime value of each of your customers, getting a better handle on churn rate, or beginning to understand how your marketing campaigns are performing, we can set you up for success.
- ACT on your customer data – Where the rubber meets the road, is operationalizing customer insights to grow your business. Our services in predictive analytics can help you maximize your spending against tactics that consumers are most likely to respond to, while our experience in marketing automation and CRM technologies can ensure your efforts scale for maximum impact.
At 3Cloud, we don’t have a technology or industry agenda; we have a customer agenda. We work with leaders spanning industries from hospitality & retail to banking and education, implementing best-fit leading technologies. Our mission is to help client organizations solve business challenges through the transformation of customer data into actionable analytics solutions. Talk to us about how you can better secure, measure, and act on your customer data to drive greater returns on investment.
