Talk to marketers across a variety of industries and they’ll likely tell you it’s the age of the customer and big data. Organizations are clamoring to gather customer data across multiple channels, including social and mobile, generating swathes of new customer data on a daily basis.  Customer intelligence professionals are tasked with using predictive analytics on this data to gain insight into customer needs and wants in real-time.

In order to be effective in this analytic task, a recent Forrester report states customer intelligence professionals require analytics with the following capabilities:

• Focused on business outcomes not statistical reporting
• Supporting long-term lifecycle metrics, not immediate sales funnel goals
• Speed and timeliness to ensure relevance at the point of interaction
• Easy to understand for better communication to internal stakeholders

Telecommunication organizations, for instance, need to use analytics on customer data to understand future customer behavior. In other words, advanced predictive techniques combined with the existing knowledge of customers can be used to develop models that help marketers predict the likelihood that a customer will respond to an offer or message. In fact, Telenor Group, one of the world’s top 5 mobile operators, used Pitney Bowes Software customer and marketing analytics solutions to build several such models to analyze and predict customer behavior, thereby reducing overall churn by 1.8% – this equates to a 34% improvement in customer retention activity – delivering $millions in incremental lifetime customer value every month.  This Telenor example has been documented by Forrester in previous reports, as the success is based on Pitney Bowes unique Uplift approach, and is listed again as an example of real business success in this new report.

While the entire customer life cycle is long, the amount of time marketers have to interact with customers is often very short. Add social media platforms and mobile devices into the equation, and new challenges present themselves – customers are not only interacting with organizations across multiple channels, but they are often using these channels simultaneously. For example, a customer may call you for support while visiting your website. This makes it increasingly important for organizations to gather customer data in real-time in order to truly develop a complete 360° view of each customer. Only then can marketers provide a positive, personalized experience, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and value.

Read the full Forrester report entitled “How Analytics Drives Customer Life-Cycle Management” and let me know what are some of your key takeaways.