Building your roadmap for data-driven marketing

NEIL DAVEY
EditorMyCustomer.com

While the attraction of data-driven marketing isn’t in doubt, the challenge confronting businesses can be daunting.

According to the Q1 2014 Gleanster Research customer experience survey, about eight out of ten senior marketers believe their organisation could be doing a better job of using customer data to inform customer acquisition and retention strategies.

But with data-driven marketing involving so many working parts, the end goal can appear unobtainable.

To demonstrate the scale of the project, Adam Sharp, co-founder of CleverTouch and member of IDM’s Executive Council, highlights just some of the main characteristics of a data-driven organisation:

• They have a handle on their customers and prospect data and know the health of it.
• They have it in the one place (a data warehouse) that is linked to both their marketing automation and their CRM. At a minimum their CRM and marketing automation are linked and data is flowing between them.
• They look at client and prospect data not just titles, company size and location, but by profile, interest and degree of engagement – prospect, suspect, customer, advocate.
• They have moved away from ROI (which is reverse engineering their contribution) and are able to measure marketing activity and customer and prospect behaviours in such a way as to forecast the future impact on the business. 
• They have removed silos from within the organisation.
• They have enhanced workflows and realigned incentives to encourage data sharing.

It is therefore unsurprising that the task can appear daunting.

However, organisations must remember that data-driven marketing isn’t so much a destination as it is a transformational journey.  

So with this in mind, what are the key steps that organisations need to take on this journey towards being a data-driven organisation?

Implement an organisation-wide data strategy

Marketers have been making significant progress with the status of their data, and statistics from the Teradata 2015 Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey indicate that today data-driven marketing is either embedded or strategic for 78% of marketers – a large increase from only a year ago, when an ad hoc approach prevailed.

However, to be truly data-driven, data must be shared between business units, and for this to be successful, data needs to be managed consistently across the entire business. For this reason, businesses need to ensure that a strategic approach to data is adopted organisation-wide.

“An overall data strategy is vital and must be understood, adopted and rolled out across the business,” notes Daniel Telling, commercial director at Occam. “This needs to be reviewed on a consistent basis to ensure that all opportunities to capture useful and relevant information are exploited.”

Key points that need to be addressed include achieving consistency in how data is collected, catalogued, stored and used.

A data governance structure also needs to be established. Former D&B global chief data, insight and analytic officer Paul Ballew, recommends: “Invest the time upfront to bring your data and third party assets together in a systematic way, such as establishing a common entity identifier, nomenclature and taxonomy.”

Restructure the organisation

For data-driven marketing to become a reality, different business units and departments must be able to collaborate and share data. And as well as demanding that there is consistency in data management, this also means that organisations silos need to be broken down, both within the marketing department and throughout the entire business.

Indeed, structural silos represent a significant obstacle that prevents the successful sharing of data and inter-company collaboration. The Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey, for instance, indicates that internal silos prevent 42% of marketers from having such a full and consistent view of their customers.

In particular, silos must be broken down between IT and marketing. IT is a vital partner for the marketing department, playing a crucial role in connecting the touchpoints throughout the business, and thereby supporting data collection and integration. Survey findings indicate that over three-quarters of marketers view the development of a strategic partnership with IT as a priority.

“In terms of data-driven marketing, IT and marketing and sales work together best when silos are broken down at all levels and they are free to operate collegiately to adopt new technologies,” agrees Telling.

Create a cross-functional team

To support collaboration and break down silos, organisations should also develop a cross-functional team, including marketers and IT.

Katharine Hulls, VP marketing at Celebrus Technologies, notes: “Data and technology are just the start. To drive value from these investments requires the right skill-sets to analyse the data to deliver insight and drive action. To be truly successful it is important to create a cross-functional team, including marketers, analysts and IT as each brings their own skills, perspectives and experiences to deliver the best results.

“Forrester Research estimates that over 45% of Big Data deployments are for marketing – but that doesn’t mean that marketing should own marketing data and technology single-handedly: they must also recognise the skills IT brings to big data technology choices and deployment. It is therefore important for the CMO and CIO to work together, leverage different areas of expertise, pool resources and ensure the robust, scalable platforms are in place to deliver long-term value.”

Integrate data

Marketers need to create a single, complete, actionable and flexible view of their customers and prospects. However, over time, most enterprises have invested in numerous marketing technologies that specialises in different disciplines, leading to siloed data and a lack of visibility of prospect behaviour, and a lack of a holistic understanding of customers.

Telling says: “There are of course some physical barriers. With complex infrastructures, and the ballooning amount of interaction points businesses have with customers, it can be difficult to create a single point of truth. For years, organisations have been trying to create the single customer view so that interactions can be personal and informed for the benefit of both business and customer.”

To address this, enterprises will inevitably need to integrate customer data from disparate systems. Ian Michiels, principal & CEO at Gleanster Research, believes there are two avenues that organisations can take.

“Consider layering in a centralised platform that can pull in available customer data and unify it against individual customer records (and keep existing legacy technologies). Or consider replacing legacy tools with a multichannel platform that can centralise and simplify access to customer data that can be used in customer communications, inform customer channel preferences, and orchestrate a consistent customer experience.”

The Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey indicates that businesses are making progress with this challenge, with 43% of executives reporting they have achieved fully integrated data across teams, compared with only 18% in 2013.

Additionally, Michiels recommends augmenting customer data records with third-party data, highlighting that top-performing businesses are twice as likely as laggards to purchase additional data on existing customers from third-party providers. 

He notes: “Additional data attributes of existing customer data may provide insight into what your customers really look like so you can focus customer acquisition efforts toward more relevant target audiences. Things like household income, marital status, number of children, and other key attributes may not exist internally from existing customer interactions but can be acquired with reasonable accuracy, making it worthwhile for informing marketing spend.”

Leverage analytics

With the data integrated and augmented, businesses can utilise analytics to deliver actionable insights and guide decision-makers. And it is not just marketers that can benefit from this rigorous exercise – departments ranging from sales and customer service, to finance and purchasing, can all profit from greater insight into prospects and customers.

Hulls notes: “To date, relatively few organisations have extended their use of analytics beyond web analytics into areas such as journey mapping, golden pathing and affinities analysis. Those companies that have pushed on with analytics are reaping the rewards: research suggests that almost three quarters (71%) have achieved better customer targeting, 58% improved conversion, 51% improved marketing personalisation and 51% improved customer experience.

“Analytics tools provide marketers with the chance to find new insight, including individual customer journey analytics and marketing attribution. To make the most of these tools, marketers need to get stuck in; ask questions of the data and gain real confidence in the depth of customer insight now available.”

To drive results, Michiels recommends identifying high-priority customer personas (according to profitability or other goals), and then focusing analytics on those core personas and optimising for 3-5 of them.

Final points

Undertaking a project of such enormity can be daunting for the organisation, and can also be unsettling for the staff. It is important that businesses manage the change appropriately.

“One major obstacle across every organisation is the fear of change,” says Telling. “Organisations need fearless, brave people who are prepared to instigate the first steps. They may already exist in an organisation but are just not getting heard, or it may be down to you to discover them.”

He adds: “Businesses need to ensure that they are investing in people (training, skills and development), planning (strategy, comms and brand), and that the processes required to apply this to the marketing programme are in place to drive value across the entire organisation.”

“Make sure you have considered your current marketing model, how it will change and what the target operating model should be. For example, this can be change in terms of people and processes. Make changes across the entire organisation’s focus, and involve different parts of the business, communicating with them as much as possible. Access to the right data and technology is a great start, but useless without the ability to draw true value and insights from them.”

How to build a data-driven marketing strategy

CHRIS WARD
Deputy Editor of MyCustomer.com Sift

Having a data strategy is by no means a new discipline for marketers. Even back in the 1960s, pioneers such as Robert Kestnbaum were outlining new and imaginative ways to collect and analyse customer data to deliver more relevant marketing campaigns.

But while database marketing was for so long seen as a specific type of marketing in the subsequent years that followed Kestnbaums’ innovative work, the relatively recent advent of Big Data means that data analysis is now no longer just viewed as critical to one marketing function, but every marketing function.

American professor of psychology Dan Ariely famously described Big Data as being “like teenage sex – everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it” - a statement germane to what marketers were experiencing in the 2000s, when consumer data levels first truly exploded. However, in the last five years a seismic shift has occurred that makes this less and less representative.

Marketing is now predominantly a data science operation, and what’s more, the technology is there to assist this – a fact that consumers are well aware of. 100% of marketers state that successful brands must use customer data to drive marketing decisions, while IBM research shows that 75% of consumers now “expect organisations to understand their individual needs”. Brands are constantly referred to the need to turn their marketing operations from art to science. Subsequently, marketers must have a robust data-driven marketing strategy in place to ensure they not only capitalise on the Big Data opportunities, but also satisfy customer requirements that are frequently being made a larger part of their remit.

Strategic importance

A key factor driving this need is customer engagement. A 2014 study from Yankee Group found 64% of consumers said they needed to be connected to the internet at all times, a number that is rapidly increasing as more devices surface. With a separate study from Shopper Sciences stating the average number of sources of information people use to make a purchasing decision through their customer journey is up from 5.3 in 2010 to 10.4 in 2014, using data to understand when and what to target and engage prospective customers with is becoming more vital. It’s the combination of being proactive and reactive.  

“Businesses and brands must be able to engage effectively with customers to market successfully to them.  This may seem obvious, but harnessing rich customer data and using it to drive a marketing strategy is the best, if not, the only way to do this well,” says Jason Lark, managing director at Celerity Information Services.

“A purely reactive marketing approach is not enough. Cultivating great customer relationships takes time and planning and rich data is a key component. Data enables you to reach out to your customers in a targeted and meaningful manner, ensuring that the age-old marketing adage is fulfilled – allowing you to get the right message to the right people at the right time.”

And Kate Cooper, CEO of Bloom Worldwide agrees, stating that marketing without a data strategy is now too hazardous for targeting the modern-day consumer:

“Tactical marketing carries risk – it’s short-term and there’s no guarantee on results. However, a data-driven marketing strategy is formed by data such as sales stats, audience profile segments, customer loyalty, competitor performance and previous marketing campaign stats which allows businesses to base their strategy on what is really needed for both the customer and the business, rather than simply relying on guesswork/short-term fixes.”

However, such strategies are not commonplace. As Axel Schaefer, senior manager, strategic marketing EMEA at Adobe Systems, notes: “Today’s marketing leaders are expected to strategically use data, and activating programs based in the insights derived from what customer or visitors share with them. Although there is plenty of data available (data on customers, prospects, competitors, product lines, and others), very few marketing organisations truly understand what to do with it.”

So how can you build a data-driven marketing strategy?

Determine how data-driven you are as an organisation at present

As a first step on the way, companies should conduct a self-assessment in order to define the status quo.

Schaefer explains: “It’s essential to identify the areas of strength and those where your organisation needs to put more focus in order to achieve a sustainable organisation. Examples could be getting aware of the available data sources, understanding the goal setting across channels that may lead to common strategic goals, etc.

“As an organisation that wants to execute on data-driven marketing, all involved need to be very aware of the available resources, the restraints, requirements and needs, in order to develop actionable steps to a data-driven strategy roadmap.”

Determine what drives your decision-making

“Before any data can be collected, before any analysis can begin, and before any results can be sought you must first decide what the key driving factor is for any decisions you make,” advises Kentico’s Stephen Griffin.

What are your KPIs? Are you solely looking at revenue or income? Do you want to create an exceptional customer experience for your current customers? Are you only interested in attracting new customers or would you like to re-engage with old ones? Knowing what you really want to achieve sets you on your way to finding out how to achieve it.

Establish what data you need to collect to support your decision-making process

“Collecting the right data is what could make or break the entire process,” notes Griffin. “Having the wrong data will send you spinning into markets you just can’t handle or will just leave you scratching your head about where to go next.”

Divide your search criteria into quantitative (what happened? – number of site visits, number of downloads, etc.) and qualitative (why it happened? – customised landing page, customer specific offers, etc.).

There is a myriad of information that can be collected. You need to decide if you want information on a person’s buying habits, what pages they like to visit, what do they interact with most, etc., or their personal info such as email, address, age, etc.

Griffin continues: “Decide on the right info to give you the correct view of the customer to allow your decision making to become simpler.”

Collect the data

Determining how to get data in a nonintrusive manner should be a marketer’s first objective, because while a glut of customer data may be available to marketers, consumers are becoming less patient with brands that encroach on privacy, and have more power to cut brands loose when they do overstep the mark.

According to findings from the Aimia Institute, the data company that oversees customer loyalty schemes including Sainsbury’s Nectar card, over half (57%) of consumers are already taking steps to actively avoid companies, with a variety of methods including unfollowing brands on social channels (69%), closing accounts and subscriptions because individuals don't like the communications they are receiving (69%) and opting out from the majority of company email communications (58%).

Part of a marketer’s data collection remit must be to identify what data can be collected from first and third party sources without disrupting a positive customer experience. Only then can marketers start asking the following questions in the data collection process:

• Are we going to use contact information forms on your website?
• Will we have surveys available at certain touchpoints on the customer journey?
• Do we require the collection of geographical locations based on IP addresses?
• Does the number of page visits on the “About Us” page of our site have a bearing on buying habits, and if so do we collect that information?
• Do we have club membership forms?
• Are we carrying out in-store surveys?

This particular step “should also be a continuous one even as you move through the entire process”, says Griffin. The moments evolve. Buying habits differ, new trends emerge, technology advances, and people change. It is important for data collection points to remain open to change.

Analyse the data and create buyer personas

The key aim of data collection is to glean a detailed level of insight that will drive future marketing campaigns. “Data alone is not going to form the best marketing strategy,” says Kate Cooper. “Data driven marketing requires a top layer to be added. Insight. This is when the marketing team uses the data analysed to form a hypothesis, vision and ongoing strategy.

One core objective for many marketers is to develop buying personas from the data, with the Holy Grail being to create a single customer view (SCV), based on what information is gleaned about who each customer is, what they like to search, what they like to buy, what interests them and what influences them.

“All of this accumulated, highly valuable qualitative data must be well managed, and scored and used to inform a single customer view (SCV),” says Jason Lark. “Information can be scored on the importance and relevancy of different attributes and then used to inform the marketing strategy – how you will use this knowledge to reach your end goals. For example, this might help you make decisions as to what technologies can be used to support this process.”

Roll out your customer-focused information

With the groundwork done, you should now know what you’re trying to achieve, collected the data that is needed to achieve it and conducted analysis on it to find insights and build personas. Now it is time to build your content around your personas and put the right information in front of the right people at the right time.

Griffin says: “You want to ‘WOW’ your customers with how well you know them and delight them with the fantastic ‘personal’ offers you have for them. Show them new items and trends that match their persona that they may never have seen without you. In every channel and through all stages of the buying process, provide an experience akin to a personal shopper in a top boutique and keep your customer coming back for more.”

It is also at this point that marketers are able to incorporate technology such as marketing automation to ensure their content is also highly personalised. And while this might be the point that makes a data marketing campaign most susceptible to customers potentially opting-out of communications as mentioned earlier, it is also becoming increasingly expected among certain sections of technology-savvy consumer.

According to a survey from 3radical, 45% of consumers state they are unlikely to buy or engage with brands if they don’t make things relevant and personalised. And 30% of consumers say they will simply ignore communications from even their favourite brands if the marketing isn’t bespoke and targeted, even potentially leading to them ending a brand relationship altogether. Only with a robust data marketing strategy can these elements be achieved.

Measure ROI

Measuring ROI provides marketers with an opportunity to assess where analysis and insight is leading to a genuine return, but is often the hardest thing to monitor, as the statistic from a recent Kentico survey which states that only 17% online marketers constantly measure effectiveness, clearly highlights.  

You need to highlight the importance of the marketing team in the overall business value. Use the answers you generated when you determining what drives your decision-making, and use data to show the influence the process has had. Do you now have more customers? Are older customers returning? Have page visits or downloads increased on your site? All these things can point towards a successful data-driven strategy helping to improve the business value.

Repeat and improve

Remember: the process should be ongoing. As Schaefer notes: “Data-driven marketing needs to be a continuous and sustainable effort.” 

The First Question to Ask of Any Strategy

• Roger L. Martin

MAY 5, 2015

The senior team of a large player in the global wealth management business recently asked me for my opinion on their strategy. They had worked long and hard at coming up with it. Their “Where to Play” choice was to target wealthy individuals who wanted and were willing to pay for comprehensive wealth management services. Their “How to Win” choice was to provide great customer service across the breadth of their wealth management needs. I pushed and probed, but that was it.

Sadly, like the majority of strategies that I read, this firm’s strategy failed my sniff test and for that reason I would bet overwhelmingly that it will fail in the market as well. The test I apply is quite simple. I look at the core strategy choices and ask myself if I could make the opposite choice without looking stupid. For my wealth managers, the opposite of their “where” choice was to target poor individuals who don’t want and aren’t willing to pay for comprehensive wealth management services. The opposite of their “how” is to provide crappy customer service.

The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you. That means that you are likely to be indistinguishable from your competitors and the only way you will make a decent return is if the industry currently happens to be highly attractive structurally. The wealth management company was targeting the exact same clients as every single global competitor and, like every other global competitor, they planned on giving them “great service.”

There are many, many such strategies. Perhaps the two most popular “strategies” are service excellence and operational effectiveness. All that can be said about them is that they are non-stupid and that is hardly an exemplary level of accomplishment.

The finest strategies are those in which other competitors do things largely, if not diametrically, opposed to what you do — and make money doing them. That means that you have made a distinctive choice. Vanguard made a real choice when it said it would not sell managed funds. We know it was a real choice because Fidelity focuses on selling managed funds, and makes enormous sums of money doing that.

It is not as though great service is a bad way to win. It is just that stated at that level of generality and abstraction, it is something that any company in the industry will strive for. Hence nobody does the opposite and it is really not a choice. Choosing to define service in a way that is different than others define it is a legitimate strategy. Four Seasons defines luxury as service that makes up for what you left at home or the office. Its luxury competitors define it as grand architecture and décor and obsequious service. Those are real choices because the opposites aren’t stupid; in fact other hotels do something that is reasonably close to the opposite of what Four Seasons does.

So do a little test of your strategy before committing to it. Ask: Is the opposite stupid on its face? Have most of my competitors made the same choice as me? If the answers are “yes,” you have more work to do to have a smart strategy rather than just a non-stupid one.

7 Proven Ways to Boost Customer Happiness in 2015

If you want to boost customer happiness in 2015, you have to take purposeful action.

BY SUJAN PATEL

 

VP of marketing, When I Work

Getty Images

Happy customers are something that no business should ever take for granted, yet few companies make this metric a priority. If you want great business results in 2015, you can't focus on things like revenue and conversion rates alone--you need to be proactive about keeping your customers happy. Here are seven ways to do it:

1. Learn How to Measure Customer Satisfaction

You can't improve something you can't measure, so your first step should be learning to measure customer satisfaction. There are several ways to understand how customers feel about your company and service. For example, you could implement a telephone survey at the end of every service call, monitor online feedback, or create a web-based customer satisfaction survey to send to all of your clients. Keep in mind, though, that only those with strong opinions will take the time to answer, so you'll want to account for potential bias in the responses you receive.

2. Be the Expert

Your customers need your help--that's why they hired you or purchased your product. So take the time to position yourself as the expert in your chosen field. This does NOT mean spending all your time telling customers how amazing you are--it means honestly educating and empowering your customers to understand your industry in a new way. If you come across as an expert they can trust, your customers will be thrilled to work with you.

3. Use Live Chat to Offer Excellent Customer Support

Customers hate phone trees. It's a fact of business, and offering an alternate way to contact you can make a big difference in the level of customer happiness you see in 2015. One of the best ways to offer real-time customer support is to offer online chat straight from your website. This allows a customer to bypass all the button pushing and get directly to an agent who can help them. If you don't already offer live chat, put it on your agenda for 2015.

4. Make Sure Your Entire Team is Managing Customer Satisfaction

It's a mistake to think that only the customer service department impacts customer happiness. Everyone on your team--from the accounting department to HR to sales--plays a role in making sure the customers are happy. Remind your staff of this frequently, and make sure all of them understand their role in boosting customer satisfaction in 2015.

5. Keep Employees Engaged

Keeping your employees engaged and inspired is the only way you can count on them to do the same for your customers. A recent Gallup study demonstrated that workgroups with higher levels of employee engagement had a higher number of highly satisfied and loyal customers. In the federal agency studied, this equated to $1 million in additional revenue. Never forget that your team is the heartbeat of your organization--and if they aren't happy, they won't give great service to your customers.

6. Build Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Around Customer Satisfaction

One way to keep your team focused on your mission to make customers happy is to tie their goals to it in a tangible way. This can be done with "a stick"--that is, with punishment for poor results. However, you may find that your employees respond better to "a carrot," or a reward for meeting a customer satisfaction goal. Whether it's a financial bonus, a special parking place or some other treat, find a way to reward employees who have excellent customer satisfaction results. Doing so will encourage others to strive for greatness as well.

7. Follow Up on Customer Satisfaction Measures Often

If you identify issues from your customer calls, satisfaction surveys or online reviews that you want to address, take the time to follow up and make sure that customers are satisfied with the changes you've implemented as a result. Measuring and responding to the key drivers of customer satisfaction is an ongoing process, not a one-time event.

If you want to boost customer happiness in 2015, you'll have to take purposeful action. Determine how you want to measure customer satisfaction, be the expert, offer live chat, get your team on board and keep them engaged and accountable. In the end, remember that the pursuit of customer satisfaction is a process. As long as you implement a plan and stay the course, you should see consistent improvements in your brand's reputation.

How new KPIs are helping companies become more customer-centric

PHOTODISC_THINKSTOCK

According to Forrester Research, organisations in industries ranging from airlines to health insurance have the potential to gain hundreds of millions in revenue when they provide a better experience for their customers. This revenue is typically driven by increased purchases, reduced churn, and improved word of mouth promotion.

To truly engage with customers and reap the full rewards of a customer-centric focus, however, companies need to build a deep understanding of their customers' journeys across all touchpoints.

Today, many organisations are exploring more sophisticated ways to build that level of understanding to provide consistent, contextual and personalised experiences - no matter which channels customers use to engage with their brand. It has become imperative for organisations to consider end-to-end approaches to collecting, analysing, and utilising customer data across all channels.

To that end, the following new key performance indicators (KPIs) are helping organisations shift the paradigm to view interactions from the customer's perspective rather than the company's, resulting in a much better understanding of customer needs and engagement:

• Customer effort score looks at making the overall customer experience as effortless as possible. Customers dislike having to contact an organisation multiple times to resolve an issue, having to repeat information, or having to be transferred from one agent to another. Organisations are analysing both structured and unstructured data mined across multiple channels - including phone and branch interactions, emails, chat sessions, and social postings - to determine how easy or difficult it is for customers to interact with them.
• First contact resolution is an important element in the customer effort score. This metric has evolved from a single-siloed measurement to an omnichannelmeasurement. This is done by trying to map the end-to-end journey customers experience across channels to achieve full resolution. For example, speech analyticscan help analyse phone interactions to identify when a customer says he/she was promised something in a previous conversation or has tried communicating via other channels. This would then be tagged as a repeat contact journey, even if it may be the customer's first phone call or a call that is beyond the time window associated with traditional first contact resolution.
• Customer health score examines how a customer might rate an organisation and allows a business to use the information to pinpoint loyal and content customers who might want to increase their purchases - and even help promote the brand. The score also helps to identify unhappy customers who need more personalised attention from agents to prevent them from churning or becoming brand detractors. The customer health score and relevant personalised suggestions should be presented to the agent every time she serves the customer. Armed with this information, agents are better equipped to handle customer interactions in a personalised and contextual way - which also helps to achieve true customer engagement.

An effective way to meet consumer demand for personalised service and a positive customer experience is to utilise these detailed metrics in tandem with customer journey mapping to create a clear view into the customer relationship lifecycle. By being able to create an illustration of this lifecycle, employees across departments gain a much deeper understanding of the customer experience. They are primed to influence and optimise customer engagement and, if need be, change existing processes and procedures.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the end-to-end service journey of a customer, including customer expectations before the first encounter. It shows the customer perspective from the beginning, middle, and end as they engage in different services and departments to achieve their goal. This helps to illustrate the range of tangible and quantitative interactions, triggers, and touch points, as well as the intangible and qualitative motivations, frustrations and meanings.

Creating a customer journey map is one of the most effective methods for understanding how customers interact with companies, whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied (including ways to address specific areas of dissatisfaction). It typically involves interviews within the organisation and customers, as well as customer-facing employees across all business areas, to get a full perspective of all the customer touchpoints.

As a way to augment customer journey mapping strategies, organisations can now employ more dynamic customer journey mapping solutions by leveraging new analytics platforms to capture, analyse and correlate customer interactions, behaviours and journeys across all channels. These new engagement analytics platforms allow for real-time information to reflect the inevitable changes in customer interactions and behaviours. Because customers use so many communication channels - often simultaneously - organisations need a single view of the customer journey, pinpointing areas of opportunity and deficiency, and developing actionable strategies to address them.

Dynamic dashboards, advanced data visualisation tools and sophisticated engagement analytics capabilities are now helping leading organisations to truly understand and affect the end-to-end customer journey. But these insights need to be applied and used by employees who interact with customers as well as back-office employees, who sometimes have a huge impact on these interactions as well. This emerging new space is called 'customer engagement optimisation', which combines advanced analytics capabilities with engagement management solutions that include unified agent desktop powered by contextual knowledge management for the front and back office, as well as optimised self-service solutions that are constantly fed by analytics insights.

Customer engagement is high on the priority list of senior executives because of the quantifiable links among customer experience, loyalty and revenue. The most successful organisations are adapting metrics and processes to reflect a more personalised customer-centric perspective. For organisations seeking to optimise customer engagement, ongoing assessment and evaluation and a willingness to update traditional metrics and business processes can provide a clearer picture of how to engage customers on their own terms, which ultimately benefits customers and company alike.

Daniel Ziv is vice president of customer analytics at Verint.

Up Next: The Greatest Era of Entrepreneurship and Small Business The World Has Ever Seen

BY THOMAS KOULOPOULOS

 

Founder, Delphi Group

Six game-changing forces are driving a new era of entrepreneurship and opportunity globally. How many of them are you tapping into?

There's a raging debate about the future of small business. On one side is a mountain of data that indicates entrepreneurship is slowing. On the other side is the rising sentiment that it's easier than ever to start a new business, whether you're a 13-year-old sneaker-head or a 65-year-old consultant.

Part of the problem is that many of the metrics we rely on to plot the future of small business are simply misleading. For example, one stat used to justify the decline of small business is that the number of startups as a percentage of total businesses has fallen from 15% in 1978 to 8% in 2012. But that's in large part because the total number of businesses has nearly doubled over the same period.

"Part of the problem is that many of the metrics we rely on to plot the future of small business are simply misleading."

A bigger part of the problem is that we are simply looking in the wrong place. Sort of like the fellow who dropped his wallet on a dark sidewalk and then walked back two blocks to look for it under the last street lamp he passed because that's where the light was!

In this same way we are looking at small business and entrepreneurship through the lens of the past, without factoring in six game-changers that are going to spur what I believe will be the greatest era of innovation and entrepreneurship the world has ever seen.

Game Changer #1--Micro-Entrepreneurs

Starting a business is not for the faint of heart. But what if you could remove the risk from the vast majority of new business ventures?

That's exactly what's happening with what are being called micro-entrepreneurshipmarketplaces. Some of the earliest and most obvious of these are Ebay, Amazon, and Etsy. While getting exact numbers on the size of these marketplaces is difficult and requires a bit of speculation, it's safe to assume that over 1,000,000 people use Ebay as their primary or secondary source of income, there are about the same number of shops on Etsy, and Amazon has over 2,000,000 marketplace sellers. Over 90% of all these sellers are sole proprietors who do not show up in any statistics about small businesses, employment, payroll, or entrepreneurship.

"...the potential represented by micro-entrepreneurism--already as high as 10% of the US workforce--is not tracked in any meaningful way."

In addition there are nearly 100 other micro-marketplaces in existence today where people earn all or part of their income. Some of the most popular are Amazon's Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, Innocentive, Elance, and oDesk, which collectively include about 10,000,000 participants.

And then you have the micro-entreprenuers who are involved in Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Instacart, TaskRabbit, Homejoy, and others; they add another 1,000,000 to the ranks of micro-entrepreneurship.

And yet the potential represented by micro-entrepreneurism (which could already be as high as 15,000,000 people or about 10% of the US workforce) is not tracked in any meaningful way. They are not employees, nor are they running a business, at least not in the traditional sense.

So, what impact will this new breed of micro-entrepreneur have on the economy? Well, consider that franchising, one of the great game changers for small business over the course of the last century, today accounts for over $1 trillion in total sales and employs approximately 15% of the US workforce. My sense is that micro-entrepreneurs will far exceed that sort of scale and economic contribution in just the next five to ten years.

Game Changer #2--The Renaissance of Manufacturing

In our book, The Gen Z Effect, my co-author Dan Keldsen and I talk about how 3D printing is creating an entirely new model for hacking the high cost of manufacturing and creating a manufacturing renaissance for entrepreneurs. With 3D printing the time and cost of prototyping, testing, and market adoption drops dramatically, as does the cost of the final product. One of my favorite examples is Easton LaChappelle, a teen who used 3D printing to not only build prosthetic arms that can be sold for a few hundred dollars, as opposed to traditional prosthetics that can cost upwards of $50,000, but also made his 3D design and engineering plans available as open source! 3D printing opens up manufacturing to just about anyone who has access to the Internet. Easton is not only creating value for himself but he is also creating a platform for value creation that ends up being an entrepreneurship multiplier.

Game Changer #3--The Hidden Billions

A staggering 500,000 new businesses are started each month in the USA alone. While only 30 percent of those businesses have more than one employee and less than 20 percent will survive their first year, that still leaves just about three million new businesses each year that are bootstrapping without any outside funding. Not all are destined to become the next Google or Facebook, but if only one percent even come close, that's still thirty thousand businesses that have a good idea and do not have access to outside capital--seven times as many as do get funding!

"within ten years the amount of money flowing through all crowdfunding platforms will at least equal that of all other funding sources."

That's an enormous amount of potential opportunity left on the table. Just to put it into perspective. Estimates from the National Venture Capital Association put the contribution of VC at about 10% of US GDP. While the math is fuzzy, we could claim that GDP would increase by as much as 70% if seven times as many businesses were able to get funding!

What will fuel these businesses is crowdfunding, through platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Bolstr, and RockThePost which to date have raised over $3 billion for businesses that would otherwise have no access to capital.

Crowdfunding may still represent under 5% of total funding from VC and angels but it's doubling year over year. I'd go so far as to project that within ten years the amount of money flowing through all crowdfunding platforms will at least equal that of all other funding sources.

Game Changer #4-- The No-Cost Failure

The entire risk profile of an entrepreneurial startup is changing radically. In the Graduate classes I teach,my students have increasingly been voicing their expectations that they need to have started at least one if not several businesses. While they would all like to hit it big they are more concerned with the stigma of not having tried than with having tried and failed. In research we did for The Gen Z Effect we found that 50% of Gen Z (born after 1995) expect to start their own business.

"...50% of Gen Z expect to start their own business."

The reality is that with the availability of micro-entrepreneur platforms, free or near-free services in the cloud, and crowdfunding options, the down side of starting a new business is approaching zero. Experimentation is all but free. All that you are investing is your time. Think about it. If I were to take you to a casino, sit you down at a roulette wheel and let you place your bet with free chips, which would pay off in real money if you won, would there be any reason not to place the bet? Yeah, now you're getting it.

Game Changer #5--The Third Act Entrepreneur

It's been said that boomers have been the most entrepreneurial generation. Yet, the vast majority have worked in a traditional organization and haven't started their own business--not yet anyway. As Boomers become Zoomers (A moniker meant to describe their continued momentum past the 65 year mark--and one I personally love since I'm smack in the midst of that cohort!) many of them are struggling with the notion of retirement.

"...retirement is a construct of the past, when attachment to a physical workplace defined the degree to which you could remain in the workforce."

By 2030 there will be more than 70 million people in the US 65 years old and over, double the size of that same demographic in 2000. In addition number of employed workers over 55 has risen by 50% over the past decade as boomers move through the workforce! The bottom line is that retirement is a construct of the past, when attachment to a physical workplace defined the degree to which you could remain in the workforce.

By the way, shunning retirement is not just an economic issue. Most of the boomers I talk to are well off. It's not about the money. There is something even more important at play. Simply put, they really are the first generation to have the choice to remain intellectually and economically engaged as much or as little as they want for the rest of their lives.

Game Changer #6-- The Other 5 billion

The final factor that we seem to consistently dismiss is the one that will amplify everything else I've already talked about, it's the Internet on-boarding of the world's population. Today we can generously estimate that about 2 billion people have regular access to the Internet. Over the course of the next 10 years we will see the affordability and the mobility of the Internet reach a point where every person on the planet has the ability to not only access the vast stores of information but more importantly educate themselves and then contribute to a global network of commerce. The easiest route to do that with the least amount of economic friction will be entrepreneurship

Opportunities Multiply

Economist Paul Romer once said to me, "we fail to appreciate the magnitude of change because opportunities do not add up, they multiply." That is definitely the case when it comes to the future of entrepreneurship and small business.

"we fail to appreciate the magnitude of change because opportunities do not add up, they multiply."

There's no doubt that ignoring these six game-changers means that you'll miss out on the opportunities that lie ahead, but take heart; standing under that streetlamp will give you the best view of each one as they pass you by.