In the February issue of DM Review, Shari Rogalski's column calls attention to a recent study by Accenture that confirms the critical role of analytics in customer relationships and demonstrates a clear linkage between analytics-based decision-making and high performance.
The study shows that there has been a dramatic increase in the importance of analytics to businesses of all types through the past four years. In fact, higher-performing businesses described analytics as being a key element of their strategy and were confident that their investment in analytics is creating a competitive edge in the market place.
Ms. Rogalski’s column makes the point that data analytics, today, presents a huge opportunity for companies to improve their performance. She notes that what was once thought to be a vision of the future – the delivery of personalized marketing messages to specific individuals – is now possible. Its starting point, she says, lies in the wealth of customer transition data that customer-facing businesses of all types collect. But the enabler that is turning the data-rich present into future reality is the application of sophisticated real-time analytics to business intelligence drawn from accurate, timely and accessible transaction data.
No doubt this is why, according to International Data Corporation’s Worldwide Business Analytics Software 2006-2010 Forecast, the business analytics market grew at a rate of 11% to $16.5 billion in 2005. IDC predicts that the market for business analytics will grow at a rate of 10% over the next five years, and that the technology segment has become a top spending priority for many companies.
At CopperKey, we are participating, and contributing, to this market growth. We have a growing list of customers who can attest to the value of analytics – especially as delivered through the use of our automated predictive marketing software BizFusion�.
While we don’t do all the things envisioned in the column, we do address one of the concerns raised by Ms. Rogalski about a growing shortage of skilled analysts. BizFusion is unique because the software is aimed at the end user, easy to implement, and automates key functions that would otherwise take up scarce human analytic resources.
BizFusion software automates the critical process of identifying an organization's best customers. Essentially working like a Google for customer data, end users can use point-and-click options to search a customer database to obtain insight about key attributes and rank customers against up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
BizFusion also allows end users to search pre-defined third-party databases, and based on best customer attributes, obtain ranked lists of "look-a-like" prospects.
So what was once a vision of the future, is very much available today.
