INTRODUCTION

It is widely accepted that Customer Analytics directly influences effective Customer

Relationship Management, which is the key to success for any business enterprise. Customer
Analytics involves analysing customer behaviour towards any service or product by gathering
data via different points of interaction that the customers make to express their views or
indicate any behaviours. This data is raw and in different forms is processed and analysed
using an analytical tool such as Datameer to gain deeper insights into customer's mindsets
and drawing a pattern via a statistical modelling module to make predictions on dependent
variables such as customer satisfaction, profitability. These insights give a deeper
understanding of the customer journey through which marketing strategies can be devised
and key business decisions can be taken leading to customer experience optimization.

BUSINESS PROBLEMS ADDRESSED BY BIG DATA ANALYTIC SOLUTION

Due to the increase in competition and ever-changing consumer trends, businesses are
increasingly resorting to analytics to meet customer demands and stay relevant in the market.
For any analytics to take shape, data is the main ingredient, and deriving insight out of it is
the biggest challenge most companies face. A big data analytic solution such as Datameer is
the key to mitigating such problems as it effectively replaces a data scientist to model,
integrates, cleanse, prepare, analyse and visualize different types of data regardless of source,
type, volume, or format by ingesting all the data into Hadoop platform.

Instead of gaining customer attention companies are increasingly competing, raising the cost
of customer acquisition and increasing the difficulty of their retention (Kitchens et al., 2018).
The given case studies highlight how Datameer helped the companies to overcome these
business problems. In the first case study, a major financial services company was able to
lessen customer acquisition costs using insights gained from Datameer to identify customer
segments and target promotions based on their behaviours. The second case study focuses on
customer retention where a financial services retirement planning company used Datameer to
predict when the customers were about to move away from their product and offer them
wealth management services at the apt time thereby increasing the chance of their retention.

SPECIFIC CAPABILITIES INVOLVED IN THE SOLUTION

            When considering the cases, the companies involved decided to analyse and foretell
customer behaviours and devise business plans based on it. This is in line with the
governance model capability in business analytics which entails the management to make
strategic alignments based on evolving business scenarios. The decision to analyse sensitive
customer data is illustrated here using Datameer, a technology-driven business analytics
capability model that is becoming increasingly important for making critical decisions within
the organization. Datameer allowed the company to collect the customer profile data through
various platforms which further allowed them to draw customer behaviour patterns which
paved a gateway to optimize their strategies. Because deeper data-driven customer insights
yield better output than intuition or guesses, Datameer has helped increase organizational
performance with these capabilities.

SPECIFIC AUTOMATION MECHANISM USED TO SUPPORT QUICK INSIGHT

AND PERVASIVE SOLUTION
In this case, Datameer uses different automation mechanisms to analyse customer data, to
effectively support the rapid response of insight and general applications. 

On one hand, for insight speed, Datameer uploads data from the web, advertising, mobile,
marketing automation, and CRM to Datameer and uses third-party data to improve it. Then,
the analysis results of these relevant data are compared with the customer's data on social
media and other media, and finally, realize the understanding and classification of high-value
customer behaviours. This will make the enterprise's advertising more targeted.

On the other hand, for drivers of persistent use, it is mainly supported from two perspectives:
mobility and user participation. Liquidity emphasizes that Datameer, without the participation
of professional data scientists, can more specifically describe the customer's portrait and mine
more potential content by analysing customer-related data. For example, in the first case,
platinum customers' preference for food channels on television and their frequent purchase
behaviours on Wholefoods. Meanwhile, user participation describes how enterprises use
Datameer to analyse customer behaviours and predict customer behaviour changes. In this
way, enterprises can reduce the cost of developing new customers and reduce the loss of
customers.

VALUE CREATED FROM ANALYTICS

             It is common for the value created from customer analytics solutions to be higher
customer retention rates and reduced acquisition costs (Kitchens et al., 2018). As both cases
reveal, Datameer uses its analytics initiative to create real value for the companies.
In the first case scenario, Datameer created value for the major financial services company by
correlating customer social media profile data with transactional data. The insights that were
obtained revealed that the high-value customers of the company enjoyed watching the Food
channel on television. Using these insights, the company placed targeted advertisements and
special promotions on cooking-related TV shows and Facebook pages. This resulted in the
company achieving a 30% reduction in customer acquisition costs and experience much
higher conversion rates. 
In the second case scenario, Datameer reduced customer churn for a leading financial
services retirement planning company by providing insights which resulted in the company
proactively reaching out to at-risk customers and offering them wealth management services.
This resulted in a 50% success rate for customer retention, where the company knows in
advance that the customer is considering moving their money. 

MISSING INFORMATION THAT WOULD HAVE ALLOWED A DEEPER

UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOLUTION

A Big data tool like Datameer helped the company to target customer acquisition costs as
well as reduces customer churn in financial services. But the real problem lies in the data
being collected from various sources (Call center, customer profiles), databases like CRM
(Customer Relation Management). In this case study, I couldn’t find any information
regarding data validity checks been performed. Its mentioned data is collected from customer
profiles and then correlated with transactional data, other things customers liked, but there are
missing links here that need to be addressed like volume, complexity, and length of data.
Another thing is, it would be nice to know about the parameters and KPI’s (key performance
indicators) used which were co-related to gain deeper insights. The customer profile
segmentation is done to analyse the customer’s behavior to know which companies they shop
the most from, what motivates them to buy a particular product, analysing all these insights
will lead to an increase in customer acquisition. But this study had focused on some customer
segments, and the result obtained cannot be considered for all populations.

SUMMARY 

Big data tool like Datameer is a one-stop solution to all business problems that arise in the
case study. It has capabilities such as users can gain insights from various data structures,
helps in integrating data with the Hadoop system, and derive significant insights. Business
issues addressed are as follows, reducing customer churn as well as the customer acquisition
cost. With this tool, the company achieved a 50% customer loyalty as well as a 30%
reduction in customer acquisition cost. The company only focused on few customer
segments; the results achieved cannot be considered for the whole population. As well as
there are a lot of missing links in the data that need to be addressed like volume, length of the
dataset, and cannot find any validity checks done on data.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kitchens, B., Dobolyi, D., Li, J. and Abbasi, A., 2018. Advanced customer analytics:
Strategic value through the integration of relationship-oriented big data. Journal of
Management Information Systems, 35(2), pp.540-574.