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Augment digital intelligence to reimagine customer engagement

Sibahle Malinga
By Sibahle Malinga, ITWeb senior news journalist.
Johannesburg, 09 May 2016
Spatial technology is proving to be exceptionally useful in tracking customer behaviour, says Forrester's James McCormick.
Spatial technology is proving to be exceptionally useful in tracking customer behaviour, says Forrester's James McCormick.

The threat of not digitally meeting customer expectation has never been greater, especially for local e-commerce players. Banks and retailers now have to compete for customers beyond Web sites, across social media and mobile apps, to offer them highly relevant opportunities during fleeting online moments.

This is according to Forrester principal analyst James McCormick, who says organisations need a better approach in maximising digital intelligence to create a highly engaging, relevant and responsive experience that will close the gap between traditional analytics and comprehensive analytics for all customer interactions.

"No matter how embedded your brand is in your customers' lives, they still have many ways to digitally interact with both you and your competitors and will move on if you don't meet their expectations," warns McCormick.

He adds meeting this expectation requires levels of sophistication, strategy, and investment that existing digital analytics practices can't deliver.

"Customer insight professionals remain overly focused on Web analytics. However, today's customers are interacting with companies across multiple channels and devices. Moreover, companies tend to build their online and offline customer channels in isolation of one another, creating further data silos," observes McCormick.

Frank Rizzo, ?Technology sector leader for Africa at KPMG and data and analytics lead for KPMG Africa, says current digital analytics practices within organisations are falling short in creating a holistic customer view.

"In SA, we have some unique challenges with the different digital platforms used to engage customers and the sophistication of the addressable market. The popular method of communication would be face-to-face, a call centre communication or via social media platforms, but at a very basic level," he explains.

Some of our western counterparts are engaging consumers via apps on smartphones, he says, adding this is obviously not quite here yet in SA because of the lower penetration of smartphones and Internet access.

So many organisations in SA are not geared or their businesses are not structured to put the customer at the centre of everything, asserts Rizzo.

Spatial analytics

McCormick says in order to close the gap between traditional analytics and comprehensive analytics for all digital customer interactions, marketing and customer insight professionals must update their approach to 'digital intelligence'.

"This digital experience encompasses the capture, management, and analysis of customer data and insights to deliver a holistic view of customers' digital interactions for the purposes of continuously optimising business decisions and customer experiences across the customer life cycle," he explains.

In this regard, spatial technology is proving to be exceptionally useful. Tracking customers' behaviour by their connected devices or other spatially sensitive touchpoints is taking off in a big way, he reveals.

"Customers are now actively using spatial technology to assist them. In fact, according to Google Trends, the use of the term "find the nearest" has nearly doubled in less than 24 months.

"Add to this, the number of spatially sensitive touchpoints is growing exponentially, which allows professionals to develop strategies to make use of the information, this extends to how customers are engaging with competitors before they interact with your own brand," he warns.

Forrester's Global Business Technographics Data and Analytics survey 2015 shows that the adoption of location analytics will expand from less than 50% of respondents in early 2015 to more than two-thirds within 12 months.

Rizzo says there's massive opportunity in spatial analytics as it's a field that is taking off with the geotagging and geolocation trends. For example, he elaborates, with the opening of the Mall of Africa, there's been a massive traffic issue.

"Organisations should ask how we predict what customers are going to want to do and start managing that pattern, as opposed to creating massive frustration with customers who will not go back to the mall because it was a mission to find parking.

"If you don't take location into account, you might be creating a dissatisfied customer or a very bad customer experience," he warns.

McCormick explains a good example of how spatial data could be used comes from a New York City theatre which monitors and analyses mobile traffic behaviour within the city to pinpoint the specific target locations of theatre-going audiences.

"It then delivered campaigns to key audiences within the theatre district, targeting hotels, restaurants, and other relevant locations. Its use of spatial analytics helped it achieve uplift of between three and five times the benchmark click-through rate."

While digital intelligence is set to make a significant impact on how companies can differentiate themselves, McCormick advises that finding the right skills may not be easy.

"This requires the convergence of business and tech skills and implementing a solid data intelligence strategy which needs to be leadership-driven, and which is understood and supported at board level," he concludes.

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