A new approach to customer engagement and commerce

During this year I had many chances to talk with different businesses within the consumer product industry and I have noticed that today many companies still work in silos having e-Commerce, CRM Insight and Digital & Social Marketing with common objectives but using different methods and tools.

Let’s take a look at each of those departments to highlight their main objectives as well as their main challenges.

e-Commerce organizations: that are very fast and innovative but still for some aspects the way of thinking is silos based. Their main objectives are:

1. Continuously increase sales through e-commerce.
2. Increase e-commerce basket conversion rate for the next quarter.
3. Reduce customer service calls.
4. Increase site traffic.

If you ask me the essence of these objectives is to deliver to the end consumer a "unique experience" based on a Omni-channel hyper personalization concept; I would compare it to shopping in neighbourhood grocery 60 years ago having nice conversation with the owner who knows everything about you and your preferences since long time.

The biggest challenge is that e-Commerce organizations can still deliver "personalization" based mainly on data available only within e-Commerce platform, while whole story of customer activities elsewhere remains uncovered, i.e. social sentiment, shopping in other channels if any, interactions with the company, etc.

CRM Insight organization: From my point of view a good CRM Insight is the heart of a robust company. Today everyone is talking about “Big data” but the most important part is neither the technology, nor the data itself but the human element behind: the "data scientist".

The data scientist helps CRM insight to achieve the following objectives:

1. Churn Analysis and Prediction.
2. Ad-hoc Analysis.
3. Value based segmentation.
4. Provide marketers with the right data to execute respective marketing actions.

The main challenges can be easily identified from typical activities of the Data Scientist: extract data from different locations, merge structured and unstructured data, analyze and interpret the results. In other words:

• Accessibility of data: most of time is spent not on analysis itself but purely on extraction, there is almost never one global "in-memory" repository of information.
• Availability of data: the reality is that in most of the cases the only data available is related to implicit data and not to explicit data, for this reason the data scientist have only the "analogic" view of the truth and they miss the holistic picture.

Digital and Social Marketing organizations: Typically driven by strong Digital leadership (with main focus on Social Listening), this model is based on social media growth with the following main objectives:

1. Social conversation rate: measures how big is the audience that replies to a specific post.
2. Social amplification: mainly used to monitor influencers, to monitor how viral a specific post became (just think about re-tweets or Facebook shares).
3. Consensus rate: the classical "Like" per post.
4. Economic value: still hard to calculate but it should represent the "conversion" of a social media communication into a final purchase; this is the most important objective to achieve if social team wants to ask additional budget to the CEO.

Since Social is relatively new instance I see it important to mention key areas where it benefits to company perception and customer engagement:

• Brand Analysis: Typical questions are "most frequent association to the brand" or "for which topics the brand is mainly discussed".
• Product innovation and new product launch: surely it's important not only to have a first feedback on a new launched product but also capture "ideas" for future products.
• Crisis management: anticipate social crisis and turn it into foundation for customer engagement through timely actions (as example have a look at this video).

Even if I saw very good looking organizations from outside, the internal challenges are every time the same:

• Too many point to point solutions not integrated each other but best of breed for single capabilities (CMO are happy while CIO become crazy on tracking all those solutions).
• Most of the spending is done on media agencies and there is no clear "track" of the Marketing Mix Optimization (there is a huge potential to reduce the overall spending but still not in place).
• There is no direct connection with the IT department and most of the time the solution "shopping" is done by Digital and Social team (IT it's not engaged) with the risk of compromising the entire IT ecosystem and adding additional complexity while CIO are fighting to decrease complexity.
• The definition of "customer enrichment" for a digital head is mainly based on implicit social media data while they should think more on a holistic picture that includes implicit and explicit transactional data that is what really builds the "unique" view of the customer.

“How to break the silos?”

Single real time repository is the basis for customer profile enrichment. Once available it becomes one source of truth including all kind of data (implicit and explicit).

Customer profile enrichment is based on a continuous cycle of listening and engagement.

Now it is right time to mention the SAP solution ”Customer Engagement Intelligence powered by SAP HANA”.

This is the foundation platform that answers the pain points of todays Data Scientists that will enable them to use predictive model directly instead of extracting data and further modelling.

How the social and e-commerce organizations can then benefit from such platform?

For the social media & digital expert the first thing to do is to move from silos point to point solutions to a unique social management platform which integrates Publishing, Listening, Reporting and provides the social marketers with unified social profile.

During this summer I was performing a due diligence to many social media companies but only one looks promising to me for the simple reason that it has been built as the unique platform from the beginning and not as a listening tool like all the others. If you are interested you should have a look at Sprinklr.

How to leverage a social media platform in combination with a real time customer engagement repository?

The inbound communication between a social media platform and the customer engagement repository should consider the synchronization of the enriched customer profile, while the outbound communication should be based on the social ranking value.

To explain social ranking value in the best way I would use an example of Amazon that uses so-called “Bestseller rank” indicator. Its value is linked to the number of recent sales of the product, relative to the other products in that category, e.g. #1 rank means that product was sold most times than any other one in the same category. Coming back to the world of Social I see the social ranking value as the one representing how a specific consumer is engaged with a specific brand.

This value it's vital for data scientist in order to associate predictive model for investing on those specific individuals.

At the end when all the data comes together there is the possibility to create a “micro-segment” giving advanced 1:1 marketing personalization that leads to ultimate e-Commerce experience.

The following picture shows how Hybris understands the future of customer engagement and commerce together with the power of SAP HANA.

This platform has three key objectives:

• Pervasive intelligence
• Engagement in context
• Execution in real time

Eugenio Cassiano