Analytics is a hot topic in the Customer Engagement world. Wes Moore of Teradata chaired a panel session on how to use analytics to drive customer engagement. The panelists included:
- John Dokes, CMO, Accuweather
- Leyda Hernandez, Director of Marketing, Priori Legal
- Merlin U Ward, Account Strategist, Renegade
Here are what the panel had to say about various topics:
When you look at analytics, how to get sponsorship? All panelists said it needs to be a partnership between executive leadership and the data organization.
What types of data do you need and what insights can you gain? For Accuweather they have a new feature called MinuteCast that lets you know the weather forecast in the next 23 minutes. They measured how long people were engaged with MinuteCast and used that data to sell more advertisement. Accuweather also looks at who attends webinars, reads blogs, video views, etc. For Renegade, they look at audience-based metrics like when people are connecting, what people do, what they like to do.
How often do you work with analytics? At Renegade they look at monthly and weekly mostly. They looked at daily reservations and found that customers responded more on Mondays and Tuesdays. They used this information to tailor their messages on those days. Priori Legal uses insights to drive SEO improvements.
What are the technologies and skills needed? You really need publishing and listening tools. These tools can help with real-time engagement by hearing from a customer and then responding through the publishing tool. A filtering capability in the listening tool is really important to get to relevant feedback. CRM is also really important and tie it to products through attribution.
In terms of skills, you need a combination of artist, mathematician, and psychologist skills to do a good job at the entire life cycle.
What works well and what types of benefits do you see? The only way to make improvements is to understand what your key performance indicators are and then use your analytics to drive programs that would move those KPIs in the right direction.
How have you approached attribution and what channels are important? Each of the panelists said they struggled with Attribution. Its hard to prove that attribution is helpful and its hard to get a company to support all the needed attributes. Its also really hard to connect attribution to sales so management often doesn’t buy into the value. Finally, the concept of a “last click touchpoint” often interferes with seeing and attributing all the customer’s touch points; sometimes “first click” is more important and analytics should be used to figure this out. Merlin thought that using CRM to figure out where customers are engaging is more important than attribution when you are weak in gathering or storing all this data.
What will be important in the future? Leaders will be looking for more data points, but also analytics that make sense of those data points. We are moving toward getting more marketing data to sales leaders in a consumable fashion. This will require data-enabling more areas of the company as well as educating leadership on what data is available, what is missing and how to use analysis results to improve KPIs.
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