The customer decision hub: A marketer's best friend

by Jonathan Moran, Principal Product Marketing Manager, SAS

In today’s digital age, consumers are interacting with businesses on multiple channels. A millennial seeks product advice on social media while taking a walk at lunch. A business professional browses for a gift on their tablet between meetings. An in-store shopper reads consumer reviews as they consider a purchase.

While these may seem like separate customers, in today’s reality, it could be, and often is, the same person. It highlights the challenge companies face in understanding how we interact with businesses and brands across multiple channels, devices and points in time.

Providing a consistent customer experience is crucial for business success. But how can you provide a consistent experience if your decision logic isn’t centralized?

Want to keep your promise to customers that they are the most important element to the success of your business? Read the paper, Achieve Customer Centricity in a Hyper-Connected World, to discover how a customer decision hub approach can help you make the right customer connections.

Download the paper

A new view of the customer

Imagine if you had a central decision-making hub that could consolidate all of those interactions into a single view of the customer and provide a coordinated strategy for meeting that customer’s specific needs.

This customer decision hub is where all marketing, services and sales activities are managed and synchronized with customer data. It enables marketers to deliver the best possible response to its customers at every point along the customer journey, making their marketing efforts more effective and efficient.

The customer decision hub uses four integrated components:

• Actions: Marketing initiatives and campaigns are implemented and customer engagement activities are tracked to create the most compelling content.
• Insights: This component includes past data, real-time contextual information and predictive analytics. Users can explore data here to see which of the planned actions are being executed, based on all available customer information.
• Rules: A central repository that defines and manages all policies, sequences and constraints across all customer interactions, regardless of channel.
  
• Decisions: Monitor and respond to ever-changing customer behavior. Channel-independent decision logic provides the ability to serve response or replies – either in real time or batch modes – to maximize success and deliver a consistent customer experience.
  

The customer decision hub enables a new customer experience

The four integrated components allow marketers to plan, analyze, engage and measure the customer journey and experiences more effectively.

Users can plan and manage their marketing programs more efficiently and effectively by integrating and automating key processes and workflows. Through a consolidated marketing dashboard, it is easy for marketers to know which activities are working, which ones aren’t, and why. These marketing activities are then linked to real revenue using financial management capabilities. Digital assets are also managed and distributed in a secure infrastructure.

With insights derived from relevant data and powerful analytics, smarter, fact-based decisions can be made. These decisions develop more relevant, targeted campaigns, enabling marketers to understand their customers better than ever. Leading-edge forecasting and modeling routines can analyze past customer behavior to predict how customers will act in the future. Analytics also enables you to calculate customer lifetime value and profitability to know which customers are the most valuable.

Expect more engagement with offers and interactions that are relevant are personal. The centralized decision making system produces analytically driven customer communications across all channels. Marketing campaigns are also optimized to deliver the right offer via the right channel at the right time, making the most of each customer contact. Marketers can also build stronger, more profitable customer relationships by using event-or trigger-based marketing.

Turn customers into brand advocates by offering exceptional customer experiences. With the smarter and more relevant customer information, marketers can know what customers are saying across all digital channels and understand their online behavior and navigation.

Customers get a consistent experience no matter the channel

A customer decision hub helps by offering you a locus for all customer interactions. The solution also solves the challenge of gaining insight from big data and analytics and better understanding your customers’ digital experience. The production and management of real-time content across multiple platforms drives growth, reduces costs and creates breakthrough customer experiences.