Alan Chow, Chief Customer Officer, Teradata
Connections
The View From Here
The Undiscovered Country
New customer channel offers an expanding frontier of opportunity.
by Alan Chow
For those of us who manage customer relationships for a living, the explosion of social media has created a great opportunity. Though it might seem daunting, we're determined to understand how interactions among networked consumers affect our ability to conduct direct communications with these connected individuals.
Accomplishing these goals will require a new approach that rethinks customer relationship management (CRM) in the context of the ever-expanding social media sphere. Dubbed social CRM, this discipline is still a developmental greenfield; however, a few facts are already perfectly evident:
No channel is an island.
If we've learned anything about CRM, it's that we can't afford more than one view of the consumer. Every interaction requires the complete context of all we know about that individual, across each channel and throughout the relationship life cycle. As different as online conversations may seem, they must be integrated into the systems and processes we rely on to understand and manage relationships globally.
There will be data—lots and lots of data.
New analytics will be required to combine the structured customer data we've traditionally collected with entirely new types of data, much of it unstructured. We'll need to map influential voices in the social channel to existing identities, so we can understand their behaviors and sentiments in context. Then we'll have to understand which influencers drive opinion and behavior for which products and services, and in which communities. That will require aggregating real-time data streams from multiple listening and monitoring devices for integration, analysis and rapid response.
Every interaction requires the complete context of all we know about that individual.
—Alan Chow, Chief Customer Officer, Teradata
Ultimately, we must extend solutions to correlate revenue-related events in any channel with sales, marketing and service activities in this new forum. Closed-loop processes will let us calculate hard-dollar return on investment (ROI). It's going to require lots of new data and large analytical workloads. For those who don't have all of the data in one place, the process will be slow, difficult and expensive.
Teradata offers the capabilities to develop this greenfield.
Social CRM is progressing in the sweet spot of our strengths—large data volumes, complex analytics and real-time performance requirements. But we're not taking anything for granted.
We're actively engaging pioneers in this area to understand the most promising technologies and business practices. Together with these partners, we will extend our portfolio with new products and services that fully integrate this emerging channel.
Teradata customers can be confident that the investments they make in their CRM infrastructure will continue to pay dividends for years to come.
Photography by Tom Rogowski