Sponsored by Pulse Survey REAL-TIME ANALYTICS The Key to Unlocking Customer Insights & Driving the Customer ExperienceSPONSOR PERSPECTIVE Whats the best way for businesses to differentiate themselves today? By delivering a unique, real-time customer experience across all touch pointsone that is based on a solid, connected business strategy driven by data and analytics insights. We believe brands that gain the ultimate analytical advantageby unifying the analytics life cycle from data to discovery to deploymentwill also gain the ultimate competitive advantage through brand preference. We partnered with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services to examine this opportunity more closely, through the insights and experiences of business leaders who are using analytics to inform their customer experience strategy. This survey offers a clear, current look at how your peers are pursuing real-time analytics capabilities, as well as their reasons for doing so. In our view, brands that build the most effective, real-time customer experiences are those that master three interrelated capabilitiesthrough analytics and insights: Unified customer data platforms: This capability unifies a companys customer data from online and offline channels to extract customer insights and shape the customer experience. Proactive analytics (with machine learning and AI): These purpose-built data collection and analytics capabilities incorporate insights on customers, marketing programs, and related customer-impacting functions such as service, operations, and support. Contextual interactions: This capability involves using real-time insights on where a customer is in a journey digitally (browsing product reviews) or physically (entering a retail outlet), drawing her into subsequent actions the brand wants her to pursue. Delivering these capabilities will also require modernizing the underlying data infrastructure in order to make it more robust and agile. This should happen in three key areas: Data volume and variety: Both analytics and AI workloads rely on dataand lots of it. The data infrastructure should be able to accommodate massive volumes of data, as well as many different data types. Data, analytics, and AI strategy: Without a clearly defined strategy connecting each of these critical aspectsone that includes stringent data governance and lineage policiesthe underlying data infrastructure may never deliver on the promise of a world-class customer experience. Unified data and analytics infrastructure: Only when data and analytics are working in lockstep with one another is it possible to accelerate and scale analytics and AI across the organization. All of this will require a fully optimized stack of technologyfrom hardware and storage to software and applicationsall designed to handle a variety of analytics and AI workloads running seamlessly in any environment, from the edge to the cloud and on-premises. With analytics, brands can see the world as their customers doand shape customer experience in real time accordingly. The reward: higher brand preference, revenue and cost improvements, and a lasting competitive advantage. WILSON RAJ GLOBAL DIRECTOR, CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE SAS MANEEZA MALIK GLOBAL SOLUTIONS MARKETING, ADVANCED ANALYTICS AND AI DATA CENTER GROUP, INTEL CORPORATION ATHINA KANIOURA MANAGING DIRECTOR AND CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST ACCENTURE APPLIED INTELLIGENCE For more information about real-time customer analytics, visit sas/ci.Pulse Survey | Real-Time Analytics: The Key to Unlocking Customer Insights & Driving the Customer Experience Harvard Business Review Analytic Services 1 HIGHLIGHTS 58% of respondents say their companies have seen a significant increase in customer retention and loyalty as a result of the use of customer analytics. 60% of respondents say that the ability to use real-time customer analytics to improve customer experience across touch points and devices is extremely important today. Customers today have high expectations. They anticipate that companies will meet them where they are and when they want. They respond to experiences that are timely, targeted, and tailored to their specific needsand reject those that arent. To meet these customer demandsto anticipate the micro moments of the 21st- century consumercompanies must be able to differentiate their brands using real- time data analytics. Today more than ever they can, thanks to a slew of converging technologies including artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and cloud computing. Indeed, advanced customer data analytics, at incredible speed and precision, arent just possible nowtheyre an imperative for companies hoping to connect tightly with their audience. “The expectation of consumers today is that everything exists in the world of the now, and that their interactions will be personalized, ” says Jeff Jacobs, partner in the category growth strategy and marketing procurement groups at management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. “Real-time analytics is absolutely core to enabling companies to deliver those kinds of experiences. ” Thats the finding, too, of a new survey of 560 business leaders conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in February and March of this year. Nearly two-thirds of the surveys respondents say that real-time customer analytics is important to their organizations overall performance today, and even more nearly eight in 10indicate it will be important over the next two years. FIGURE 1 Among our other key findings: Nearly six in 10 survey respondents58 percentsay their companies have seen a significant increase in customer retention and loyalty as a result of the use of customer analytics. Just over half the survey respondents say their use of real-time customer analytics has provided them with a significantly better understanding of, and strengthened, the customer journey. Nearly half the survey respondents say their use of customer analytics has generated significant revenue growth. Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents say theyve increased their spending on real-time customer analytics solutions over the past year. This trend of embracing real-time customer analytics has begun to take root in a number of consumer industriesled by early adopters in retail, banking, and telecommunicationsas well as at many newer companies that were born digital. REAL-TIME ANALYTICS The Key to Unlocking Customer Insights & Driving the Customer Experience For more information about real-time customer analytics, visit sas/ci.2 Pulse Survey | Real-Time Analytics: The Key to Unlocking Customer Insights & Driving the Customer Experience Harvard Business Review Analytic Services These organizations are equipping their employees with real-time data and visualization tools to enhance the customer experience. Their goal: boost their share of wallet and revenue, in some cases upending incumbents and entire industries. The early adopters are already reaping positive results. Survey respondents who rate their real-time customer analytics practices as very effective are more likely to have seen increases in customer retention and loyalty, revenue growth, customer lifetime value, profitability, and speed to market than their peers whose practices are not very effective. They also are more likely to have seen increases in innovation and the introduction of new business models, products, and services. “ As a strategic priority, real-time customer analytics is through the roof, ” says Geoffrey Moore, business consultant and author of Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption. “The early adopters bought in entirely, built monster capabilities, and are getting results. ” Leading digital companies have spent a decade fine- tuning algorithms to offer relevant product recommendations that increase the likelihood of effectively upselling and cross-selling products at every touch point. They have mastered dynamic approaches that enable them to adjust prices on thousands of items based on consumer demand, buying behavior, competitors pricing, and other market factors. They have also built real-time customer capabilities that enable them to create personalized experiences for customers at scale. Their real-time platforms have been years in the making and are continually being refined. However, the investment has paid off, and these companies now set the standard for customer experience expectations. Unfortunately, thats not been the case for everybody. For companies that are lagging, Moore says, it represents an unprotected vulnerability they know they have to act on. “The problem is that they have to adopt the appropriate technology, hire the right people, and, most importantly, reengineer their business processes, which is incredibly hard for a large organization. ” In fact, despite the importance of real-time customer analytics and experiences to enterprise strategy, the vast majority of companies lack these capabilities today. Just a fraction of the survey respondents give themselves FIGURE 1 Percentage of respondents indicating that the ability to use real-time customer analytics to improve customer experience across touch points and devices is extremely important today and that it will be extremely important in two years 60% 79% TODAY CURRENT ABILITY TO DELIVER REALTIME CUSTOMER INTERACTIONS ACROSS TOUCH POINTS AND DEVICES IN TWO YEARS FUTURE ABILITY TO DELIVER REALTIME CUSTOMER INTERACTIONS ACROSS TOUCH POINTS AND DEVICES FIGURE 2 16% 30% SOURCE: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW ANALYTIC SERVICES SURVEY , MARCH 2018 VERY EFFECTIVE VRNGR MCUSOMR NRCONSCROSSOUCHONS NVCS NOT EFFECTIVE VRNGR MCUSOMR NRCONSCROSSOUCHONS NVCS