A growing number of companies are harnessing the power of customer analytics to gain deep customer intelligence, according to a recent survey by Aberdeen Group. As a result, they are able to make smarter customer relationship management decisions and obtain greater control over their marketing outcomes.
The research reveals a number of striking performance disparities between Best-in-Class, Industry Average and Laggard companies. For example, Best-in-Class companies outperform Industry Average and Laggard companies in terms of customer acquisition rates by a factor of 2 and 43, respectively, and by a factor of 1.8 and 10.5 when it comes to customer retention. Best-in-Class companies also excel when it comes to customer up-sell / cross-sell effectiveness as well as overall return on marketing investment.
"Offer Optimization is a concept whose time has come," said Jeff Zabin, Research Fellow at Aberdeen Group. "The convergence of customer analytics and enabling technologies with core business processes is finally bringing to fruition that much-ballyhooed promise of one day cracking the code on the combinatorial complexities of presenting the right customer with the right offer through the right channel at the right point in time. In many ways, Offer Optimization sits at the very heart of marketing performance improvement."
In addition to deploying the right set of enabling technologies, including marketing automation software and predictive modeling applications, Offer Optimization requires a combination of strategic actions and organizational capabilities. While analytic skills provide the foundation for everything from customer segmentation to marketing mix optimization, customer data first needs to be optimized for analysis and made accessible in such a way that it meets the needs of the team conducting the analysis. This requires the expertise of an operations team skilled in customer data management, including the ongoing process of data integration and cleansing.
To view the report visit http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=6223.
