Business leaders believe that being able to deliver real-time customer interactions is “extremely important”, according to a recent study sponsored by Accenture Applied Intelligence, Intel, and SAS and conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. Titled, “Real-Time Analytics: The Key to Unlocking Customer Insights & Driving the Customer Experience,” the study also reveals that companies using analytics are experiencing notable gains, while many others are not yet able to effectively service their customers in real time.
The convergence of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) is bringing new opportunities to brands that includes the use of advanced analytics to better understand their customers. They learn what customers expect in any given moment and place which they then work to deliver.
Though 60% of surveyed business leaders believe that delivering real-time customer interaction is extremely important, only 16% consider themselves very effective at the delivery, and 30% said they were not effective at all.
In spite of this low effectiveness, 44% experienced increased revenue generation and growth from their customer analytics efforts. Also, 58% reported improvements relating to customer loyalty and retention.
However, corporations are having difficulty constructing an analytics program capable of real-time engagement with customers, with only 11% saying they have a solution that enables this kind of interaction. Common hurdles include missing technology, current organization culture, and a lack of infrastructure to access customer data. In order to make the necessary changes, the study found that transformations need to start at the top and be company-wide efforts.
“Successful brands deliver on customer expectation by creating hyper-personalized, real-time customer experiences built on three capabilities: a unified customer data platform, prescriptive analytics powered by machine learning, and contextual interactions across digital and physical touchpoints. Real-time customer analytics is the platform that enable these strategies at scale,” said Dr. Athina Kanioura, a chief data scientist at Accenture Applied Intelligence, in a press statement.
