Harvard Business Review Survey Finds That Customer Analytics Are Critical

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently conducted a survey of 560 businesses to determine why and how they use real-time analytics capabilities. HBR worked in collaboration with the SAS Institute, Intel Corporation, and Accenture Applied Intelligence to create and administer the survey.
 
According to a report on the survey written by Wilson Raj, global director of customer intelligence at SAS; Maneeza Malik, global solutions marketer at Intel; and Athina Kanioura, chief data scientist at Accenture, the best way for businesses to differentiate themselves is to deliver, “a unique, real-time customer experience across all touch points.”  
 
The survey found that 70 percent of respondents have increased their spending on real-time customer analytics solutions over the past year. A little over 50 percent reported that real-time customer analytics have provided them with a significantly better understanding of customer behavior.
 
Furthermore, 58 percent said their companies have seen an increase in customer retention and loyalty because of customer analytics, and half the respondents said customer analytics have generated significant revenue growth.
 
According to Raj, Malik, and Kanioura, success of this kind follows from, “mastering three interrelated capabilities: unified customer data platforms, proactive analytics, and contextual interactions.” Unification of data enables organizations to extract customer insights, and proactive analytics integrate those insights with marketing programs and service and support functions. Mastering contextual interaction requires organizations to understand how to move customers from browsing, either digitally or in-person, to purchasing.   
 
Even though customer analytics appear very beneficial, only 16 percent of survey respondents said that their companies are delivering real-time customer interactions effectively. A total of 30 percent rated themselves as being ineffective at providing such capabilities. In comparison, 60 percent said that having this capability is critical now, and another 79 percent said that it will be critical within two years.
 
“There’s no doubt that the ability to master the full customer-analytics life cycle from data to discovery to deployment,” writes Raj, Malik, and Kanioura, “will determine competitive advantage in the years ahead. To capture that advantage, companies will need to align data collection, integration, analytics, and deployment across the enterprise.”
 
As a step towards this integration, the SAS Institute announced its SAS 360 Plan, a software-as-a-service application designed to address the need for marketing resource management. That offering is part of a suite of customer intelligence applications that use SAS’s core analytics engine.
 
Still, the survey suggests that most organizations have a long way to go before achieving full customer analytics integration. For example, while 83 percent of respondents said the ability to translate data into actionable insight at the optimal time is critical, only 22 percent said they have been successful in accomplishing this goal.
 
“The primary issue most organizations are struggling with is an inability to create workflows based on real-time analytics that span multiple business functions,” said Raj. “The goal needs to be the unification of customer experience across all functions and channels.”
 
While this unification hasn’t been reached quite yet, the SAS 360 Plan is at least a step in a positive direction.
 

Recent Content

Membership and Pricing

Videos and podcasts

Membership and Pricing