Last week, Mitch Wagner, editor in Chief at The CMO Site put out a blog post on how Target Knows You’re Pregnant Before the Stork Does that I thought had some interesting relevancies to the contact center space. Not on pregnancy predictability of course, but more on customer intelligence.
In his post, Wagner notes that many pregnant women starting their second trimester make revealing purchases like unscented lotion, calcium and magnesium supplements and other scent-free soaps that indicate that they may, just may, be nearing a trip to the maternity ward. By keeping an eye on customer trends like this, the company can be, ahem, very targeted when they send out baby product offers like wipes and formula. Target knows that gaining the diaper devotion of these new-mother shoppers early can mean loyalty for years to come.
The key to this intelligence is data analytics, or specifically, predictive analytics. It is taking the huge lump of sometimes unworkable customer data and converting it into usable analysis. There are obviously privacy concerns involved here, but social consumers as a whole tend to be more receptive to providing businesses with personal information as long as it’s not misused and results in deals and offers specialized to their interests. Send them offers for World of Warcraft, and you may lose their loyalty.
The connection here is that the tighter you integrate your customer contact center with your CRM, the better able you will be able to use and convert data. Add in predictive functionality like speech and text analytics, and you can develop a workflow that will improve the decisions you make, the actions your agents take, and sometimes the direction the enterprise chooses. Without this integration, you have data that you may or may not be able to use.
You can read more on predictive analytics as a part of the Microsoft Data Platform here. I predict you will 