Amplify 2015 is IBM’s conference for Digital Marketing and Commerce. This is a big year for IBM as they look to take advantage of their cloud capabilities and bring together all of the systems they have purchased over the last few years. Alex Banayan kicked off the opening session talking about how life has changed for companies trying to engage with customers. Marketing is no longer about the four Ps, but is now all about the one C – Customer.
Deepak Advani, GM of IBM, was up next to bring in the IBM viewpoint on engagement. Deepak started with a question, “How is your customer feeling today?”. Getting in touch with the customer’s feelings or emotion is critical. All the great brands have taken advantage of how customers feel about their experience with the company’s products. Instead of thinking of B2B, B2C, etc. you have to think of C2B as the customer is now the leader.
81% of companies say they have a holistic view of customers across segments/channels. However, 78% of customers think that brands don’t understand them. That’s a pretty wide gulf of viewpoints. And guess who wins? The customer. IBM is focusing on big data and analytics to help marketers reduce the disparity between how a company views customers and how customers view the company. The data and analytics then leads to the ability to create personalized, one-to-one conversations with customers.
Hannah Egan then showed some of the new products IBM is delivering to the market. Journey Analytics and Journey Designer. These tools try to solve the problem of making all the data we collect actionable and to provide collaboration between marketers.
Journey Analytics combs through data and looks for customer segments. The tools allows you to identify business goals and the analytics uses those goals to find the journeys. Information from the analytics tool flows into Journey Designer so experience designers can create great experiences.
Journey Designer is a Design tool to create experiences based on customers journeys. In the designer tool, marketers can collaborate during the design process. You can also create many different interactions, including mobile push.
Elaine Kuo is a designer in the IBM Commerce Design team. She talked about Commerce Insights which is targeted at merchandisers. Merchandisers want to better understand how their products and categories are doing. Commerce Insights provides a dashboard to show category performance in real time. It also shows category product rankings so they can see top performers in their stores. You can drill down in the dashboard to see how specific categories and performing and how inventory is impacted.
Commerce Insight also integrates with the commerce site so as a merchandiser is looking at problem areas, they can click into the site to see what the customer experience looks like. Merchandisers can then correct issues they find with the site.
IBM recently made an announcement about a partnership with Facebook for marketing to consumers through Facebook. Facebook has 1.4 billion users so they have a lot of data that can be beneficial to marketers. There are 40 million businesses on Facebook and Facebook wants those brands to have a first class presence. Blake from Facebook talked about the partnership where marketers can use SilverPop to create email campaigns and have those emails show up on Facebook.
Watson is also a big part of IBM now. The marketing business is taking advantage of Watson Analytics to identify patterns and customer information that will be useful in IBM Commerce. Watson will make predictions based on the analytics and the questions you ask.
IBM gets the fact that the world is now customer centric. They are committed to helping companies improve customer engagement.
