Producing gold
At the same time, many Asia Pacific firms will still question the value of analytics-related investments. This is particularly true among more traditional family owned organizations and manufacturing firms in high-growth markets like China, India, and parts of ASEAN, where the emphasis remains on a product-centric approach that prioritizes operational improvements and efficiency.
While this focus will remain important, successful analytics strategies will quickly evolve from extending existing - often product-centric - capabilities and services to transforming the business itself, including existing operations and processes. CI teams must illustrate the clear link between digital strategies and customer analytics as increased competition fuels a need for improved customer centricity.
Consider the alchemist’s case to produce gold, not just find gold, and start by:
- Linking customer analytics to broader customer experience and digital initiatives. Effective digital transformation fueled by CI requires an outside-in approach to customer understanding. For most Asia Pacific organizations, this is only possible with direct CEO support. In the absence of executive sponsorship, successful customer analytics will likely be limited to improving and/or extending existing marketing approaches.
- Actively leveraging CI to optimize existing marketing capabilities. While it’s nowhere near sufficient for sustained success in the age of the customer, improving the use of data to optimize marketing campaigns is still necessary. This includes core capabilities around database marketing, campaign planning, forecasting, and predictive modeling as well as performance monitoring, measurement, and analysis Ñ all of which rely on effective data integration and analytics.
- Developing strong data governance as a way to win consumer confidence. The days of competing on low prices are long gone. As companies collect and analyze a plethora of consumer data to gain insights into customer behavior and thus purchasing patterns, the need to store this data securely and limit access appropriately becomes all the more pressing. The current controversy over medical databases up for sale to marketers - complete with last names and addresses - has sparked privacy fears among consumers. Companies that have strong data governance - setting ethical guidelines on how data should be properly accessed and stored securely - are unlikely to face backlash from the public. Quite the opposite: they will increase customer loyalty as consumers trust and have confidence in the company’s products and services.
Michael Barnes is VP and Research Director at Forrester Research
This article first appeared on Telecom Asia Big Data Insights March 2015 edition