360 Degrees of “Shock and Awe”

Being a Google Partner, I am introduced frequently to new digital capabilities that can really transform how companies do business across their sales, marketing, and customer care channels.

But I have to say… having been in the digital space for so many years, I find it easy to not be “awed” by all of the new technology. Because I know something even cooler is going to be released within the next year.

What does produce “shock and awe” for me is figuring out the best way to use the technology to come up with solutions to business challenges.

So, with this in mind, we’ve recently had some opportunities dealing with the “Moby Dick” of the omnichannel world – identifying the 360-degree view of the customer.

Yes, do you ever feel like Captain Ahab? Trying to catch your customer through that all-encompassing perspective. It does feel for me somewhat quixotic, right? Ok, enough of the unreachable goal references!

One of our long-time clients, a global brand in the food and beverage space came to us with one such customer challenge.

They couldn’t figure out why so many of their customers didn’t sign up for their loyalty program… thousands, perhaps millions of people. And this company does business online, in physical locations, on mobile apps, over the phone. Truly omnichannel!

So, we went after this challenge by building a portrait of our client’s customer in Google BigQuery with data from their web store, mobile app, and physical stores. We developed a framework to create a 360-degree view of the customer. After conducting cross-session, channel, and campaign analysis, we identified common characteristics between single-time and top purchasers that suggested to us that the company could be leaving multi-millions of dollars on the table.

Like solving any good mystery, once the clues were clear the rest of the solution came relatively easily: identify clear and specific promotional strategies and tactics to target high-value and “at risk” customers with personalized offers that encouraged additional purchases and loyalty.

When I think about how we developed this solution, my technology awe returns because I realize we couldn’t have done this type of work so easily a few years ago. The machine learning, connecting the dots with the data, using Google Cloud… this would have taken a lot more time. We’re not just creating those 360-degree views, we’re cracking the code of customer experience improvement. Doing something actionable and productive – and that’s what I’m continuing to be awed by.