While the Web has brought companies that use it as a channel to market a number of benefits, it has yet to fulfil its promise of creating mutually beneficial and profitable relationships between organisations and their customers. This is the view of Franc Trivella, chief technology officer at SAS Institute South Africa.
While companies can register clicks on their Web sites, most have yet to find ways of deriving intelligence from Web data to improve customer satisfaction with the site.
In addition most companies are not able to forecast and plan for demand on the site to ensure that it can cope with sudden surges in the number of hits due to seasonal demand or attacks by hackers.
The answer to these challenges lies in the implementation of business intelligence solutions that allow companies to make sense of the wealth of data they collect through their Web sites. These solutions, which SAS Institute calls "e-Intelligence," add intelligence to the operational systems that make Web transactions possible to ensure that those transactions are efficient and profitable for both users and owners of Web-sites.
The benefits of e-Intelligence
Because each click a customer makes on a Web site is recorded, companies have gained access to a wealth of information about their customers that is not recorded in other channels unless a sale is achieved or a contract signed.
Applying e-Intelligence solutions to the data gives companies the means to understand their customers' online behaviour and personalise their Web-based offerings. In turn, this can help them to build closer and more profitable relationships with their customers.
E-Intelligence can also help companies to convert a larger potion of Web site hits into sales by ensuring that customers can reach the information they are looking for in the minimum amount of clicks.
In addition, e-Intelligence helps companies manage the capacity and performance of their e-business systems and infrastructure to ensure that they will be able to plan for spikes in hits and transactions. This gives customers fast and reliable access to the online resources they are looking for, ensuring that the organisation never loses sales because its Web site is slow or unavailable.
Knowing your customers is vital on the Web because it is the only channel where your competition is one click away. Brand loyalty is strong when a customer visits a retail outlet or responds to a mail-shot. However, the Web consumer is a different animal, with low patience for slow Web sites or offerings that don't meet his or her needs.
E-Intelligence has as many benefits in the business-to-business (B2B) environment as its does for a business-to-consumer (B2C) Web site.
For example, a Web marketplace that serves as a broker between buyers and suppliers. Within this marketplace environment, e-Intelligence benefits all three parties.
Buyers can use it to compare offers from suppliers and evaluate supplier risk, while suppliers can use it to determine which products to cross-sell to existing customers. Marketplace owners can gain an edge over their competitors by using e-Intelligence to give their buyer and supplier communities added value in the form of market intelligence.
Although e-Intelligence can significantly improve the profitability of Web sites, what organisations should be striving for is integration of Web intelligence with intelligence from other channels, such as call centres and point of sale. Achieving this level of integration allows a company to build a holistic picture of its target market. These helps companies to improve communication with customers across each individual channel and decide which channels are profitable for which audiences.
As a result, organisations that use e-Intelligence solutions can take intelligent decisions about which channels they should invest in, make informed inferences about the behaviour and preferences of customers using the various channels the company supports, and present a consistent face to customers across the range of channels.
Choosing a solution
The market for Internet business intelligence solutions is as yet fractured and immature, making it difficult for a customer to confidently commit to a solution from a particular vendor.
As a starting point, customers looking for e-Intelligence solutions need to look for a suite of products that is vertically scalable with the ability to cope with unlimited data volume to cope with the exponential growth in their data as the Web site starts to process more hits and transactions.
A number of specialist software providers have come to market with business intelligence solutions that target the Internet world. However, most of these products are niche solutions that leave companies striving to gain a holistic view of their customers across with painful and expensive integration projects.
SAS Institute stands alone in the fragmented market for e-Intelligence solutions as the only vendor that deliver a suite of products that not only addresses the two critical issues of ensuring Web site performance and understanding user behaviour, but also allows companies synthesise information across their channels.
Customers also need to closely examine the financial health of their suppliers to reduce the risks inherent in Internet projects. In this fast-moving market, niche vendors are in constant danger of being swallowed by larger players, or burning through their cash resources. Both of these outcomes can led to an abrupt end to R&D on a product-set, leaving users with investments that cannot be carried into the future.
Look for a vendor that has a long history in the software market, and a proven record of delivering scalable business intelligence solutions to its customers.
Background on e-Intelligence solutions from SAS Institute
SAS Institute's e-Intelligence solutions combine data warehousing, data mining and business intelligence technologies to allow;
Clickstream analysis
SAS Institute's primary e-Intelligence solution, e-Discovery, analyses clickstreams from different Web data sources in high volumes of Web traffic, providing report templates and supporting ad hoc queries into Web visitor behaviour.
Real-time profiling
e-Discovery adds intelligence to real-time profiling to ensure that the underlying rules are based on fact. Unless real-time profiling is based on a historical understanding of audience behaviour, it will not be effective. e-Discovery enables the marketer to discover whether purchasing or interest patterns indicate an existing or likely cross-selling opportunity.
Web-site performance management
SAS Institute's e-Intelligence suite also includes an enhanced version of IT Service Vision, SAS Institute's performance management solution. IT Service Vision ensures the reliable performance of an enterprise's entire e-business infrastructure including Web servers, networks and phone systems. Data from these systems are warehoused and analysed to provide IT management with intelligence on e-business infrastructure usage and to predict future capacity requirements.
Share
