Customer engagement requires knowing your crowd

How well do you know your customers? While most brands would say they know their ideal shopper, how many can break down their customer engagement into finely tuned segments based on analytics? Some can, but too many are still behind the curve when it comes to having the loyalty platform to gather data, visualize and discover patterns of people […]

3 reasons loyalty programs aren’t an option

If you happened to be at TUCON 2013, TIBCO’s user conference, you heard about Turning Customers into Fans from Head of Client Technical Services Wen Miao. In Miao’s words, “It is no longer acceptable to have only a transactional relationship with customers.” He’s absolutely correct. We are in an age where we can use our loyalty platform as the […]

Loyalty marketing and picking pumpkins for Halloween

Would you associate loyalty marketing with Halloween? You will when you finish reading this. When we were kids we headed each October to the local farms to find the perfect pumpkin for Halloween. The biggest constraint was the size of the pumpkin…it was a rule that we had to be able to carry our choice […]

Snowden told us things we should have already known

Snowden’s stories of a far-reaching NSA shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone working with Big Data. We’re entering a new age and the technology and techniques of the past won’t hold up. Just reading the headlines is all the evidence we need. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone was being monitored by […]

Customer loyalty is a bird in the hand

We’ve heard the phrase, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” since childhood. We were being told by wiser adults to value what we have over the things we don’t. Customer engagement has the same lesson at its heart: We can more easily achieve our goals by creating better, more loyal […]

Thoughts on how mobile tech will change our work

When we think of mobile technology and the workplace, it’s very easy to go down one of two paths: I can be reached 24 x 7 and never get a break thanks to my smartphone I can work from anywhere and have freedom thanks to my smartphone Both of these paths are a real part […]

Which marketing platforms are here to stay?

The sheer number of marketing applications offered as downloads or services is exploding. Everyone wants in on the real-time marketing game, likely because as the U.S. and the world come out of an extended economic downturn, there are few places more ripe for automation leading to efficiency than how we market and sell goods. What’s more, the […]

Is mobile retail starting to grow up?

It really takes two things for mobile retail to become the norm…it has to be high on the agenda of the major brands and it has to be an expectation of the consumer. We’re making progress on both fronts. A recent survey by Internet Retailer shows that 79% of retailers now find mobile commerce important, […]

Do your customers seek you out?

How much does customer loyalty bring your business to your stores, site or app versus how often you seek out the customer? If you’re achieving meaningful customer engagement and your loyalty programsare working, the balance will be in your favor. Being Sought We’ve worked hard to help people accidentally find us. Search engine optimization (SEO) is as old […]

Why Customer Experience Management and Why Right Now?

You run a successful business, your customers are primarily repeat offenders, and your marketing department is giving you everything you ask for. Why would you care about doing more around customer engagement and, more importantly, why would you do it right now? These are great questions that customer loyalty marketers should be asking themselves. After all, who […]

Do we have a right to be forgotten?

The Web and Big Data are making the world a much smaller place. Uncomfortably small in some cases. As reported in the NY Times, many sites have sprung up across the Internet that post mugshots online in what could be best described as extortion…they’ll take them down for a fee. What truly makes it extortion […]

Big Data calls for the rise of the citizen developer

John Skovron has over twenty years of experience working with systems that run mega scale grid computing solutions. These are the systems used primarily at financial trading shops that are able to compute against loosely coupled, high variety and distributed data that most of the world wouldn’t ever consider as possible. When he slows down […]

4 Secrets of Killer Loyalty Programs

Few things hold more promise right now than Big Data, mobility, social platforms, and cloud computing. Their impact on brand loyalty and customer engagement management is enormous. The reasons aren’t that hard to figure out and look like this: Big Data brings a rich tapestry of information together at the perfect moments for customer engagement. […]

Surprise: iOS 7 and the iPhone 5S are a Killer Customer Engagement Platform

Apple gave customer engagement management a tremendous boost with its release of the iPhone 5S and iOS 7, and most people don’t even realize it. While much of the world is talking about the smartphone’s fingerprint sensor and other obvious features, Apple quietly (very quietly, in fact) introduced much faster, separate processors that make their […]

Advanced analytics doesn’t have to be so hard

Bruno Aziza describes himself as a “data geek.” From his roles with Microsoft and BusinessObjects/SAP to SiSense, he has been on a mission to bring advanced analytics to the business user for over a decade. We first met Bruno when he spoke at Interop’s Big Data Workshop in Las Vegas last May and shared thoughts on […]

Now do you believe social connections are currency??

It’s actually fun to watch a hot trend move from hype to something that we simply expect. Big data will get there, hopefully soon, and social media is already arriving at that point. How do we know? Creativity. When the hype passes, the paradigm change has taken place in people’s minds and we start to […]