When TMI is never enough

TMI (too much information) may be a popular dismissive remark for online texting chatterboxes, but there’s no such thing as TMI for marketing mavens when it comes to current and potential customers. Marketers, it seems, can never get enough information, and in today’s b Save ig data world where every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take (apologies to Sting) is seemingly captured electronically, marketers find themselves swimming in info. The problem, of course, is converting all of the information into something useful, such as deep customer knowledge, so marketers can predict what a particular customer will want to buy next, and offer them a deal on that very product right now, whether the customer is online or in the store.

Behind all of the marketing magic, particularly at big organizations, you’ll typically find a team of data scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, operations researchers, computer scientists and assorted high-end analysts, most of them with advanced degrees in their respective fields. Given the enormous market demand for these quants and the skills they bring to the table, how do you build an effective, productive, collaborative analytics team and how do you retain the team members and keep them engaged when they all have good reason to believe that they are the smartest person in the room?

These two related problems – creating deep customer knowledge and building and retaining analytics teams that make company mission-critical goals such as deep customer knowledge possible – are the focus of several articles in this September/October issue of Analytics magazine.

To the first point, Guy Mounier, co-founder and CEO at CustomerMatrix, extols the virtues of  “Cognitive computing for automating customer knowledge.” Swaroop Johnson, a consultant at Blueocean Market Intelligence, follows by walking readers through the process of understanding the role of customer intelligence, managing the customer experience and delivering real-time results in his article on “Customer intelligence.”

Turning to the issue of analytics team-building, senior data scientist Vinod Cheriyan outlines how online lender Enova International built a successful analytics team by balancing talent engagement with business priorities in “The magic of managed autonomy.” Next, Rasesh Shah, CIO of Fractal Analytics, and Aliasgar Rajkotwala, Fractal’s global head of IT, discuss “Building global business collaboration” based on security, freedom and mobility.
Too much information? LOL.