Feature
The right, relevant information meets customers where and when they are most receptive to offers; customer wants, needs, cares and worries can be uncoveredand addressed in real time via the channel best suited for a desired response; company recordsprovide customer interaction histories and inform similar; word ponds are analyzed to reveal what customers are thinking or how they are feeling about a product, service, brand or company; and customer profiles become enlightened when we know what they tweet about, pin on Pinterest, “like” on Facebook, who they follow … enough said, you get the picture.
We’re in an era where information can be spun into gold.
SAP’s new Social Contact Intelligence analytic application, which was introduced yesterday, does some of this work; it’s part of SAP’s HANA-powered Customer Engagement Solution which does the rest.
“There’sso much information and so much opportunity to know the customer,” says Jamie Anderson, Head of Global Solutions Marketing, Customer LoB Solutions (CRM), SAP.
Needless to say, companies who leverage that information best will be at a distinct advantage when it comes to winning the future.
Introducing SAP’s Social Contact Intelligence Analytics Application
SAP’s Social Contact Intelligence Analytics Application sits atop of SAP HANA, a superfast in-memory database system that processes Big Data at record speeds. It allows businesses to unlock sentiment and contact insights from both social media channels (like Twitter, Facebook, Google) and internal, company owned resources such as customer purchase and return histories, call center calls, methods of payment. points of sale, etc. That information can then be used to better target and influence prospects and customers in a variety of ways.
The solution differentiates itself because it goes well beyond looking at social or CRM data in isolation, says Anderson. It takes into account the relationship that an individual already has with a company or brand, sentiment analysis from places like call centers, and external information that can be gleaned from all over the web.
Instead of scrambling to gain insight from data where it’s often siloed in disparate applications, this solution brings it all together, processes and analyzes it in real time and puts it into the hands (or onto the screens) of customer facing workers in an instant.
That’s an unprecedented opportunity to win business.
Time, Content, Context and Contact Differentiate
“There’s a period of time in a customer interaction, three minutes, I think, during which a customer is 20 times more likely to buy,” explains Anderson.
And it is in that instance that a single platform, with real time data, real time insight and real time action-ability has the power to produce wins in ways we haven’t seen before at such scale.
An Example From the Old Days And How that Has Now Changed
Picture this: you’re a small bank in a small town that wants to sell investment vehicles to its customers. "Who’s most likely to buy what," is a question that bank officers ask themselves all of the time.
Once upon a time, the bank officer relied on his gut or mined data for insight. In the case of the latter, the mined data that he’s delivered about a particular customer reveals shopping for a christening gown. The wheels in the bank officer’s head start spinning, what could I sell to someone who’s just had a baby? A saving bond comes to mind.
Genius, he thinks. He practices his pitch. This should be a slam dunk.
But his prospect proves to be disinterested and non-receptive. Why? Because the baby already has more savings bonds then the mother knows what to do with. The christening was last week. A month ago the mother might have been interested because she thought the baby would be getting clothing, silver rattles, toys and snuggies for gifts. Not only that, but she had twins and her house is small. An extra bedroom would be nice too.
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But the bank manager doesn’t know any of this.
I suck at selling, he thinks instead. Or maybe selling savings bonds to parents isn’t the thing, maybe he should try life insurance. Or maybe he was selling the right thing but his pitch was off.
Bottom line is that he doesn’t know what went wrong because his prospect has told him nothing but “not interested.”
But we see the data and we know where the problem lies. It’s not the bank manager, it’s not his pitch, it’s not the financial instrument he’s trying to sell.
It’s the data he used. It’s old. His insight would have been dead-on had he had the information six weeks ago.
Fast Forward To Today
A bank manager wants to sell a financial instrument. He “looks” at a prospect that he might approach, "what would she be most likely to buy?" He doesn’t need to think too hard, he pulls up the customer’s profile and there on the screen he sees that that she has been pinning baby furniture, that someplace there’s a reference for “twins,” that college fund research might have been done and that someone from the family comes in to make a deposit on Thursdays.
Now the bank officer has something to go on … shopping for baby furniture earlier today; twins -- what size house does the family live in; college -- is there a fund to be sold or can he start an account to which guests to the christening can contribute?
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible. And with all the data that’s available, and all of the insight that can be gleaned in real time, there’s so much potential to get it right.
SAP’s New Social Contact Intelligence Analytic Application is part of SAP’sintegrated Customer Engagementoffering which also includes:
- SAP® Audience Discovery and Targeting analytic application, which allows marketing managers to engage customers and help convert prospects by running advanced segmentations on large target populations and distilling insights into focused and personalized marketing campaigns.
- SAP® Customer Value Intelligence analytic application, which can give sales and marketing managers real-time customer insight into the true value of their customers, personalized recommendations for cross- and up-selling and closed loop execution.
- SAP® Account Intelligence mobile app, which offers mobile sales teams real-time customer insights and personalized selling recommendations that allow them to create target lists, increase the effectiveness of their sales visits and seize sales opportunities from anywhere.
“Customer segmentation models that took more than 12 hours to complete today can be run 985 times faster,” said Bernd Seidel, Business Solution Management, Thomas Cook AG. “That makes a big difference to our business users allowing them to experiment with different segmentation models and receive instant responses so they have the ability to build more personalized and targeted sales and marketing."
Title image courtesy of Tang Yan Song (Shutterstock)
