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Digital Convergence eGuide with LondonLovesBusiness
1. in association with
E-GUIDE
BEYOND CLOUD...
THE AGE OF
THE CUSTOMERHow the convergence of key tech
trends is changing business forever
in association with
2. 2
in association with
It was almost
a year ago that
Londonloves
Business.com
published its Cloud
For Business e-guide.
At that stage, most
managers still
weren’t exactly sure what cloud was, nor
why it was being touted as so significant.
It was still mainly the IT departments of
organisations urging management to
consider shifting to cloud technology, though
FDs and CEOs were beginning to latch on.
Now, cloud has become common
parlance in boardrooms across the country,
regardless of industry. Managers have
realised the huge benefits cloud offers, from
creating new efficiencies, to safeguarding
the business network, to realising true
competitive advantage. It is hard to come
across a senior executive in any discipline
who doesn’t now grasp how important
technology is in propelling business forwards.
The appetite for technology is now
coming from a range of different business
disciplines. Early last year, Gartner
forecasted that by 2017 an organisation’s
chief marketing officer will be spending
more on IT than its chief information officer.
That seems highly plausible.
Technology is no longer the
glue that sticks together email
and business networks to get
employees through the working
day. It is the engine of innovation.
And, because customers are
adopting new technologies at an
unprecedented pace, technology
is increasingly at the heart of all
customer relationships.
Brits have embraced
technology with relish. Six in 10 mobile
phone owners in the UK have smartphones,
according to Ofcom figures from December
2012. Brits spend more online than any
highly-developed economy in the world,
according to the same data set. A recent
Nokia study found the average Brit checks
their smartphone around 150 times a day.
All of which makes Gartner’s prediction
completely logical: if consumers are making
digital such an entrenched and constant
part of their lives, then marketers are going
to have to get to grips with technology and
learn how to forge meaningful relationships
with customers through digital media.
Looking at the customer experience only
through the prism of marketing is, though,
slightly reductive. Because driving the most
exciting customer engagement advances is
an understanding that business technologies
must now operate across all disciplines and
all silos of an organisation, holistically. And
to glean the most detailed customer insights
and offer the most sophisticated customer
experiences, cloud-based technologies
and digital channels should operate as
one ecosystem and fully integrate. This is
what digital convergence is all about. The
technologies at its heart offer immensely
powerful insights into customer behaviour
“Do you want to
understand your
customer better than
your rivals?”says
Sophie Hobson, editor
INTRODUCTION
›
3. 3
in association with
This e-guide is brought to you
by LondonlovesBusiness.com,
in association with IBM.
LondonlovesBusiness.com is
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Editor: Sophie Hobson
sophie.hobson@
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0203 394 1847
CONTENTS
04
Foreword
By Doug Clark, IBM UK & Ireland Cloud Leader
06
What is digital convergence
and why does it matter?
08
The key technology trends
And how they are changing the way business is done
14
Winning in a converging world
How these new technologies are coming together to
revolutionise customer experience and engagement
17
What now? Find out more...
that will change the way businesses interact
with their customers forever.
So do you want to understand your
customer far better than your competitors?
Do you want to have truly meaningful
conversations that forge deep loyalty? Do
you want to predict behaviour patterns to
save costs while boosting sales? Then it’s
time to understand the connection between
convergence, cloud, and, most critically, the
new age of the customer.
4. 4
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Cloud has
revolutionised
the way our
organisations
operate. It has driven
incredible new
efficiencies, made
collaboration easier
and been the platform for new business
innovation.
Now we are seeing cloud and cloud-
based technologies redefine the relationship
between business and customers. At IBM,
we have this idea about a role: the Chief
Executive Customer. We believe business
should be completely centred around what
your customer wants, and we are dedicated
to creating technology that helps you
achieve that focus.
Of course, the customer has always
been at the heart of good businesses. But
it hasn’t always been easy to get to know
your customer. Just a few years ago, if you
wanted customer feedback, you’d have to
ask. Now you can pick up on a customer’s
feelings without them having to exert one
calorie in telling you. You can listen to their
conversations on social media. You can
analyse their interactions with your website,
across various devices. You can understand
how often they like to buy, what sales
channels are best suited to them, and how
they like to communicate with your business.
All of this gives you the information
you need to personalise each individual
customer’s interactions with your business
and ensure you are always being as relevant
as possible. By tailoring your offer to them at
every junction – which our technology allows
– you foster loyalty, generate greater interest
and ultimately increase transaction rates.
This is crucial for businesses that want
to survive and thrive today and tomorrow.
Customers are now able to broadcast their
feelings about your business to the world
with the click of a button. It is vital that
you have a deep understanding of what
they like and dislike, so you can move
immediately to adapt products and services,
gain market advantage, and develop
genuinely wanted new products and
services. Customer service is more
important than ever in the digital age.
We have worked hard to ensure that
the technology we create lets you constantly
learn from and adapt to what your
customer really wants. We can even help
you predict what they want before they
know themselves.
Your customer is your new boss. Now
it’s time to do things the way they want.
Follow me on Twitter:
@IBMcloud
@cloudstuff
“By tailoring
your offer at
every junction, you
foster loyalty and
ultimately increase
transaction rates,”
says Doug Clark,
IBM UK & Ireland
Cloud Leader
FOREWORD
5. 5
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Brits have become increasingly
tech-savvy in recent years, and the huge
leap in consumer technology has meant
people now expect to be able to interact
with a business on whatever channels suit
them best at any given moment. They might
ask a business a question about a product
on Twitter, then buy through the company’s
website, then pick it up in-store. Or they
might, say, order a taxi over the phone,
then expect a text to let them know it is five
minutes away.
Customers certainly aren’t thinking about
“digital convergence” at any stage of these
commerce cycles. But business are thinking
about it – at least, those businesses that
understand how convergence allows them to
understand their customers like never before;
to tailor customer experiences and customer
services to unprecedented levels of quality.
WHAT IS DIGITAL
CONVERGENCE
AND WHY DOES
IT MATTER?
6. 6
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marketing resource is best allocated to
convert them to a sale; or through which
digital channel they are most likely to
ultimately make a purchase; what the total
cost per acquisition
is for them across
all your channels,
and therefore how
valuable they are
to your business; all
the while building
a very detailed
profile of who they
are, what and how
they like to buy
from you, and the
most effective way
to communicate with them. You could then
give them an entirely personalised customer
experience that gives them only what they
really want.
By looking at group customer behaviour
across all those different digital interactions,
you would be able to identify which
marketing channels are most effective for
which products; understand immediately
how well a new product or service has been
received through social media sentiment
analysis, and so refine or develop your
offerings immediately; predict what orders
you should be placing ahead of the curve by
instantly identifying patterns in purchasing
behaviour; and so on.
This might all sound fantastically
futuristic – too good to be true, even. But,
as it happens, the technology to achieve all
this is already available to us.
The trouble at the moment for most
businesses is that their various digital and
physical channels operate independently
from one another. Even where digital
interactions are being monitored and data
So what exactly is digital convergence?
To understand that, it’s important to
first think about how a customer interacts
with your business digitally. Think of your
business’ digital
presence – you
probably have social
media channels,
a website and a
mobile website, at
the very least. Then
there are the other
forms of digital
interaction you
have with them,
whether or not
they are visible to
the customer – email, your CRM system,
your payment systems, maybe SMS and
newsletter campaigns, and so on.
Digital convergence is the shift towards
unifying these technologies, so you can
glean unprecedented insights from them and
better manage the customer experience. By
housing these various technologies on the
cloud, the most sophisticated technology on
the market allows you to understand how
a customer behaves across all channels. You
can pull out more granular customer profiles
and more accurate behaviour patterns than
anyone would have thought possible even a
couple of years ago.
How? Every single digital interaction
your customer has with your business,
through any channel, is a potential data
point. Imagine if you could capture all
these data points then synthesise them and
analyse them to reveal customer behaviour
trends. You might be able to understand,
for example, what form of digital
communication an individual customer is
most responsive too, and therefore where
“Digital convergence
allows you to glean
unprecedented
customer insights
and better manage
the customer
experience.
”
7. 7
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collected carefully, insights into customer
behaviour are fragmented.
You might know, for example, that
10% of your Twitter followers reacted
positively to your new product launch by
using Twitter sentiment analysis tools, or
through reporting from your social media
bods. And you might
know that you sold
£10,000 of that
product in your first
fortnight. You might
also know that your
website saw a 3%
uplift in traffic over
that same period,
with 34% coming from mobile devices. But
are you able to join the dots between those
different insights, to see how many of the
social media advocates of the product then
converted to sales, and whether they bought
from you via your website or offline?
The aim of today’s smartest business
analytics technology is to give you those
insights, by picking up those manifold data
points across all those different digital
interactions, then analysing that huge
amount of data to draw out meaningful
patterns and insights. That means you can far
better understand how your customers are
behaving, and, even better, what is going to
be most useful to them in the future.
This is what the convergence of the
technologies in this e-guide – mobile, social,
analytics and cloud – is all about. It is about
pulling together insights that were previously
fragmented and getting technologies that
didn’t talk to each other to interact and
inform one another. Convergence aligns the
data from different cloud-based services,
then uses analytics to identify patterns and
trends and improvements you could make
across the board.
The best technology also facilitates
far better conversations with customers.
Once you can see where a customer is most
responsive to your communications and
digital interactions, and understanding their
buying habits, you can make your marketing
to them completely bespoke. That means
you only communicate with them in the
way that best suits them, bringing them the
most relevant offerings – saving them hassle
and annoyance, and saving you unnecessary
expenditure.
What all this points to is a shift in what
business technology is trying to achieve.
Cloud (and the technologies it acts as a
platform for) are no longer just useful
for making your back-end IT system more
efficient – you hopefully will have taken
care of that already. Instead, the new
wave of business technology is completely
customer-orientated. Viewed through the
prism of what’s best for any gives business’
customer, the leading software and
technology providers are creating solutions
that enable you to understand and serve
your customers better than ever before.
So let’s meet our key technologies
and find out why they matter so much
independently, then how they can be
brought together to help you win in the
newly converging world that is the age of
the customer.
“The smartest analytics
technology lets you understand
what is going to be most useful to
your customers in the future.
”
8. 8
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THE KEY
TECHNOLOGY
TRENDSAnd how they are changing the way business is done
Technology is accelerating at such
a pace that customers are coming to
expect excellence in every interaction with
businesses – though they increasingly see
that excellence simply as the norm. Few
would realise how fiendishly complicated
it is to make superlative digital customer
relationships look simple. Are you still
stopped in your tracks with wonder, for
example, when an online retailer displays
product recommendations (bespoke for you)
when you’re on their website?
The technologies that underpin services
like this are fantastically intelligent, but for
customers, they are simply part of modern
living. That means there is more pressure
than ever before to give customers the most
personal, enjoyable and easy experience
of interacting with them through digital
media.
Businesses risk falling behind if
they can’t grasp the importance of the
technologies that are ushering in far
superior customer relationships.
Those that will gain competitive
advantage, meanwhile, will be the
businesses who fully appreciate how
much value the right technologies can
add to their customer relationship: how
these technologies work, what they are
capable of, and what they can do for both
businesses and their customers.
If you want to keep pace with your
customers’ expectations and, perhaps
even more importantly, get ahead of your
competitors, you need to understand how
dramatically technology is revolutionising
customer experience and engagement. This
chapter will explain the key technologies at
the heart of that revolution.
CLOUD
Cloud computing has radically improved
business technology. (As a reminder, cloud
is the technology that lets you access digital
services, apps and data from any digital
device, anywhere, as they are stored remotely
from that device – iCloud, Flickr and email are
all good examples of cloud in action. If you
haven’t quite got your head around cloud
and all its incredible benefits, our e-guide on
cloud for business explains all.)
The cloud landscape is evolving fast,
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$35.6bnvalue of the global cloud
computing services market
by the end of 2013
Visiongain
delivering ever-better
value and services and
enabling businesses to
find new efficiencies
and smarter models. It’s
no surprise, then, that
its popularity seems to
be exploding. In April,
Visiongain forecasted
that the global cloud computing services
market would be worth $35.6bn by the end
of 2013.
Cloud sits behind the other three
technologies cited in this chapter. It acts as
a platform for them, enabling them to be
pulled together to work in unity. It’s worth
noting that cloud is the means of delivery
that is facilitating the latest advancements,
rather than a new trend in itself.
Up until recently, the agility, security
and affordability that cloud offers were
being deployed by businesses mainly to
improve operations that weren’t really
visible to the customer: to streamline IT
systems, management processes, supply
chains and distribution networks; to enable
businesses to scale up and down according
to the needs of fast-changing workforces; to
enable collaboration between employees,
partners and suppliers; to improve business
network security and safeguard data; to
facilitate more sophisticated remote working
opportunities; and to unearth new back-end
operational efficiencies using analytics.
And cloud is still enabling all those
benefits for businesses. But as well as that,
it is now being used as a powerful, game-
changing platform that brings together the
other technologies detailed in this chapter.
These technologies are entirely centred
around customers, and their advantages
are completely visible to them. The major
advancements in social,
mobile and analytics
technology that you
will read about in this
e-guide are possible
because they all
operate on the cloud.
Cloud’s flexibility,
economic advantages,
instantaneousness and data-crunching
capabilities are being used in ever-more
exciting ways to improve the customer
experience. The next chapter will explain
more about this.
FURTHER READING…
› Cloud infographic: The forward thinker’s
guide to Cloud
› Our e-guide on cloud for business
Find other useful links at the end of this guide
SOCIAL
BUSINESS
Facebook is now the world’s third largest
population. Twitter has more than half
a billion customers. According to the
government’s Office For National Statistics,
half of all adults in the UK use social media
sites – rising to 87% among 16 to 24-year-
olds. We are living in the social age.
The significance of social media for
businesses is hard to overstate. It has
fundamentally changed the dynamic of the
customer relationship, and is revolutionising
marketing. Terry Jones, founder of
Travelocity.com and chairman of Kayak.
com, summed it up at IBM’s 2012 CMO+CIO
Leadership Exchange when he said: “It used
10. 10
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to be so simple: marketing drove people to
the door, sales closed the deal, and IT added
it up. That was it. Marketing was a one-way
street. Then along came
the web and it really
changed all of that.
Marketing is now a
two-way street, because
customers are engaged
and involved, and
they’re talking back.”
That “talking back”
is key, because it means that for the first time
in history, businesses can really understand
what their customers love and loathe about
their business – not what they say they like in
surveys and on customer service helplines, but
what they tell their friends and colleagues
about a business in casual conversation.
Social media makes every single person
who interacts with your business either a
promoter or an assassin of our brand. If they
don’t like what you’re doing, they can – and
will - broadcast it to the world. Of course,
if they have a positive experience of your
business through social, they become a
marketer for your business. The significance
of brand reputation on social shouldn’t be
underestimated. PricewaterhouseCooper’s
2012 Global Multichannel Consumer Survey
found that six in 10 online shoppers use social
media to “follow, discover, and give feedback
on brands and retailers”.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by quite
how much conversation there is out there
on the web. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in
October 2012 that 500 million tweets are sent
each day – that’s more than 347,000 every
minute. And that’s just one social media
channel. How do you distil the sprawling
morass of chatter across the multitude of
social media channels out there – particularly
when significant new social media sites seem
to spring up every couple of months? And
how can you then use the insights and data
gained from social to
drive decision-making?
Human data
capturing just won’t
cut it when there is so
much data out there,
so the right social
business analytics
tools are key. The best
technology allows you to capture opinion,
identify trends and patterns, then use
predictive analysis to unearth opportunity
according to where those trends are
headed.
Social business analytics, such as IBM’s
Social Business technology, for example,
can help you in the following key areas to
improve your customer understanding and
engagement:
› Marketing: gain insight into individual
customers so you can create tailored
marketing campaigns for them and have
authentic conversations with them
› Sales: insights into customer profiles show
you customers’ preferred communication
style and where the greatest profit
opportunities lie
› Product development: use the constant
stream of customer feedback on social
media to inform tweaks and improvements
to products and services. By analysing
wider conversations across social, you can
understand what the hot topics are and
what subjects are growing in importance for
your customer base – and so identify growth
markets
› Customer service: you know by now that
social lets you respond immediately to
concerns and complaints. But it gets much
347,000number of tweets sent
every minute
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo
11. 11
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better than that – social business analytics
uses sentiment analysis to model and predict
emerging problems – meaning you can
foresee problems and avoid them, super-
charging customer loyalty
Social isn’t just about listening to
customers. It’s about having meaningful
conversations with them – and, beyond that,
anticipating when they want to talk, so
you can create new business opportunities.
With the right analytical tools to make
sense of the enormous amount of data that
social creates, you can get unprecedented
insights into customer behaviour. Today’s
technologies allow you to make sense of all
that unstructured data to gain overviews of
what customers think, and to act on that.
They also let you track sentiment to help
you fire-fight, and to capitalise on positive
sentiment on social.
The next chapter will explain how social
business comes together with analytics and
cloud products to make sure you are always
listening to and acting on what customers
are saying about your brand, whether
directly or indirectly.
Taken a level further, the right social
business technology can in fact help you
avoid negativity on social media. Advanced
social business set-ups let customers “self-
service” digitally, connecting them with
one another and more directly with the
organisation so they can resolve problems
more quickly, rather than turning to
social media to complain. Look to phone
company giffgaff by way of example: it is
mainly run by its customers, who connect
with each other and constantly provide
feedback and ideas to the business on how
it can be improved. This gives customer
both a valuable sense of ownership,
and far less reason to moan publicly.
The government is adopting a similar
approach. By encouraging people to
manage improvements to their local area
and services through digital, it has engaged
citizens and made them part of the process.
The customer feedback and interaction
in both these instances clearly gives both
organisations the huge additional benefits
of saving costs and improving their offerings
more quickly.
FURTHER READING…
› Social business: http://www.ibm.com/
social-business/us/en/solutions/social-
analytics.html
› More on the business of social business:
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/
thoughtleadership/ibv-social-business.html
MOBILE
The explosion of smartphones in the UK and
beyond is staggering. A 2012 Cisco report
found that mobile data traffic in 2011 was
12 times the size of the entire internet
globally in 2000. The government’s Office
for National Statistics reported in February
2013 that one in three UK adults accessed
the internet using their mobile phone every
day in 2012. And it’s not just smartphones:
tablets and other mobile devices are
becoming evermore prevalent. Analysts
have estimated that between around 40 to
50 million tablets were shipped worldwide
in the first three months of 2013 alone.
Meanwhile, PC shipments fell.
The mobile device is increasingly at the
centre of consumers’ digital life. Mobile
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device users increasingly
access endless reams
of their personal and
business lives through
their phone, from
family photos stored
in the cloud to shared
sales spreadsheets that
can be collaborated
on remotely through cloud packages for
business. A smartphone or other mobile
device has the potential to be the gateway
for all of an individual’s digital data,
applications and services.
Among all the other things they are
now capable of, it’s particularly relevant for
businesses that mobile devices are now also
shops – and mobile retail, also known as
m-commerce (i.e. enabling customers to buy
through their phones) is exploding. In June
2013, Gartner forecasted that $235bn will
be transacted by mobile phone globally in
2013, up some 44% from 2012. Smartphones
are becoming wallets, payment cards and
bank accounts too. They let you tap to pay,
transfer money by text, and host digital
wallets.
What do all these mind-boggling
advances mean for businesses? Mobile
devices are data. A consumer’s interaction
with a mobile provides a fantastically rich
wealth of data points. Understanding how
a customer interacts digitally with your
business via their mobile device tells you
how they like to buy and what they want
to buy. The next chapter will explain more
about how you can garner and harness
these insights.
A phone is, of course, also a
communication device – and it provides the
perfect conduit for you to communicate
with your customer throughout the
purchasing process,
and to entice them
into a transaction, or
simply foster a stronger
relationship. The
next chapter will also
explain how you can
capitalise on the ever-
present mobile phone
to better serve your customer.
The key for businesses is that mobile
devices are just that: mobile. You can
deepen relationships with your customers
through mobile by giving them exactly what
they want, wherever and whenever they
want it.
FURTHER READING…
› http://www.ibm.com/mobilefirst/us/en/
Read the ‘What next?’ section at the end of
this e-guide to find out more.
ANALYTICS
David Cappucio, an analyst at Gartner,
recently made an address that gives us some
idea of the amount of digital data out there
today. In the last 60 seconds, he pointed
out, there were 204 million emails sent, two
million Google searches, 20 million photo
views on Flickr, 100,000 tweets sent and
277,000 Facebook logins.
There is a staggering amount of
digital data being created in everyday life.
Even just for your business, every digital
interaction a customer has with you on all
channels generates a potentially useful data
point, as previously described. That amount
$235bntransacted by mobile phone
globally in 2013, up 44%
from 2012
Gartner
13. 13
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of data can be completely
overwhelming – how do you
even begin to know what
to filter out, what’s useful,
and, most importantly, how
to draw meaningful patterns
from it?
That’s where business
analytics comes in. Analytics
has evolved into something
really quite magnificent
in recent years. Originally,
businesses used analytics
to better understand their
own internal processes, find
efficiencies and drive down
costs. For example, they might identify
duplications in their print marketing –
sending more than one brochure to the
same household, for example – and use
the information to streamline back-office
processes, saving costs.
But analytics is now being used to
increase customer loyalty, cross- and up-sell,
improves conversion rates and increase
the frequency of sales. How? Data and
insights from all channels, from all points
of digital interaction with customers, are
brought together and analysed holistically,
rather than analysing each silo or function
of a business individually. By housing your
various digital services on the cloud, analytics
technology can pool data and draw out
deeply meaningful insights about customers’
behaviour on an individual and group level.
These insights help you understand how
to better serve your customer, and how
to gain competitive advantage by staying
one step ahead of what they want – this
is known as predictive analytics. An IBM
whitepaper identifies the following five
best-practice ways that customer value can
be maximised using predictive
analytics: base your customer
strategy on predictive
profiles; predict the best way
to win the right customers;
predict the best way to grow
customer relationships; predict
the best way to keep the
right customers longer; use
predictive intelligence at every
customer touch-point.
The difference analytics
can make to your bottom line
is quite astonishing. An IBM
Institute for Business Value
study cites IBM research that
found organisations can increase customer
retention by up to 9% for each increase in
analytic maturity, and move 4% of their
sales orders to more cost-effective channels.
It’s little surprise, then, that an MIT Sloan
and IBM Institute of Business Value study
found that “organisations that excel in
analytics often outperform those who are
just beginning to adopt analytics by a factor
of three to one. And top performers are 5.4
times more likely to use an analytic approach
over intuition and gut instinct when making
decisions.”
In the age of the customer,
understanding your customer better than
your competitors is what gives you true
advantage.
FURTHER READING…
› IBM Institute for Business Value’s
Customer Analytics Pay Off whitepaper
› Whitepaper: Five predictive imperatives
for maximising customer value
› IBM Smarter Analytics
If you have a few minutes, take this big data
survey: www.ibm.com/2013bigdatasurvey
Analytics can create
9%potential increase in
customer retention
4%of sales orders
move to more cost-
effective channels
IBM
14. 14
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Customers are becoming increasingly
multi-channel in the way they interact
with businesses – and vice versa. The lines
between B2B and B2C are blurring, as all
of us change the way we expect to interact
at work and socially. A potential customer
might, for example, notice a brand via a
Facebook Like, and quickly browse the
brand’s website. There the customer sees the
brand’s Twitter feed, and decides to follow it.
Weeks later they
see a tweet about
a promotion
while scanning
Twitter on their
phone, and click
through to view
the product.
Instead of buying
there and then,
they email the link to themselves and make
the purchase a few days later from their
office computer, requesting to pick up the
item from the store nearest their home.
They get a text telling them when the
product is ready for pick-up, then a follow-up
email a fortnight later to ask for feedback
on it, including a 10% discount off their
next purchase. Delighted with the service,
the customer tweets about it, and gets a
response from the brand within the hour.
Now, keeping track of all that and
being able to trace the route the customer
takes across your different channels – not to
mention trying to figure out which channel
provided the greatest ROI in terms of the
final sale – could, understandably, seem like
something of a nightmare. It actually isn’t
at all, if you have the right technology – but
we’ll come to that shortly.
Firstly, let’s focus on the great news:
although multi-
channel shoppers
might seem
more difficult to
track, it is widely
estimated that
they spend 30-50%
more than single-
channel customers.
Research from
Deloitte has put the figure as high as
80% more per transaction. That means a
straightforward and sophisticated way of
managing multi-channel customers is more
necessary than ever if you want to realise
bottom line growth.
Even if someone chose to flagrantly
ignore the financial sense in facilitating
a smarter multi-channel way of engaging
customers, they are likely to fall significantly
behind competitors if they don’t keep pace
WINNING IN A
CONVERGING WORLDHow the these new technologies are coming together
to revolutionise customer experience and engagement
“It’s widely estimated
that multi-channel
shoppers spend 30-
50% more than single-
channel customers.
”
15. 15
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with customer habits. Customers are coming
to expect a smooth, seamless journey
across different channels. The customer in
the above example is becoming typical. In
the age of the customer, businesses must
be able to accommodate all the different
ways that customers may choose to interact
through at any given moment, on any given
device and through any given channel.
To go beyond that and exceed customer
expectations, businesses have to be
exceptional at all points of digital interaction.
They must shift from addressing the wider
market to forging personalised relationships,
understanding and communicating with
individual customers. When the customer is
at the heart of everything, businesses must
make sure they are always providing exactly
what the customer wants, when they want it,
through the medium that best suits them.
For example, an airline could send you a
message in real-time on your mobile when
your aircraft has to change gates. Or your
bank might text you when you walk past a
branch asking if you would like your balance
displayed, or tweet you to let you know they
have a free appointment slot if you fancy a
chat. In these examples, analytics, social and
mobile are all working in unison, underpinned
by the cloud. And you can imagine how useful
services like this exceed expectations.
To really win loyalty, then, your
customer must be at the heart of your full
commerce cycle, from buying to marketing
to selling to servicing. The beauty of the
new wave of converged technology is that
it brings together all the insights from each
segment of the commerce cycle, viewing the
cycle holistically.
With the customer at the centre of the
commerce cycle, converged technology
can identify new opportunities for growth
and greater efficiency while servicing the
customer better.
SMARTER COMMERCE ›IBM’s Smarter Commerce approach, for example, facilitates all this by drawing together
different cloud-based technologies, making sense of various channels and data sets,
and giving incredibly deep insights into customer behaviour. Among other things,
Smarter Commerce helps you determine what customers are doing and saying; manage
interactions with them across all channel; determine the best response; and engage
them with targeted, personalised interactions. It streamlines different channels, pulling
together insights into and processes for social media marketing, cross-channel campaign
management, customer awareness and analytics, brand experience, marketing resource
management and digital marketing optimisation. Not bad, eh?
IBM reports that businesses using this truly cross-channel approach have seen up to
300% productivity and campaign volume growth, 10-20% increase in response rates and 20-
40% lower campaign and marketing costs.Smarter Commerce applied to selling processes
has seen businesses realise 60-70% annual growth, with an 85% conversion rate when a
customer uses more than one channel. This is offered through the ability to, for example,
let customers pay online and pick up in-store, reduce B2B sales costs by automating manual
processes, and offer better delivery options to exceed customers’ expectations.
16. 16
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WHAT NOW?
FIND OUT MORE…
Turn information into insights
Organisations are overwhelmed with data. On a smarter
planet, the most successful organisations can turn this
data into valuable insights about customers, operations,
even pricing. With advanced analytics, you can open new
opportunities for business optimisation by enabling rapid,
informed and confident decisions and actions.
› Read more about Smarter Analytics
›
Connect and empower people
Innovation comes from collaboration. And collaboration
comes from everywhere. Firms that embrace the power
of social technologies will unleash the productivity and
innovation throughout the entire value chain — from
employees to partners to suppliers to customers.
› Read more about Social Business.
The cloud removes restraints
Smarter comes at a cost: hardware, programs, people to run
them. Cloud computing offers multiple ways to reduce that
cost through efficient use of resources. Utilising the cloud
means not having to power idle equipment and being able
to rethink and redistribute software quickly and easily. It
also means a nimbler, more efficient organisation.
› Read more about Cloud Computing
17. 17
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Business moves to mobility
Even as storefronts had to adapt to the Internet, commerce
is adapting to mobility. Armed with smartphones and
tablets, consumers want to use those devices to browse,
shop and pay. Today’s leaders recognise that desire and are
building mobile enterprises in response.
› Read more about Mobile Enterprise
WANT TO TALK MORE?
›
Tweet us:
@londonlovesbiz
@cloudstuff
@vickygillies
@LauraColvine
And join in the conversation using #techforbiz
If you are interested in attending an event to
discuss these converging trends, please send
your contact details to vickygillies@uk.ibm.com
