Most people would describe Teradata as a data warehouse and analytics vendor as my colleague has reviewed its core technology. In addition to that, through its own development and by partnering, the company has branched out into the applications market. One such application is Teradata Relationship Manager (TRM) main purpose is to personalize customer interactions, regardless of channel or type of interaction, although its target area is predominantly marketing.
The product consists of six components: marketing resource management (planning, automating, reporting and managing marketing resources), campaign management (running single or multistage, multichannel marketing campaigns), offer management (working out the best offer based on the customer’s profile and timing of the offer), communication optimization (prioritizing all customer communications regardless of channel), interaction management (delivering information in real time to the point of customer interaction) and analytics (providing data mining and analysis for the business user). Teradata says TRM has been successful, with customers buying some or all of these components, including over three dozen who have upgraded to or purchased the latest version. That release includes several enhancements, the most prominent of which make the product easier for business people to use, extend the number of data sources that can be included in the analysis, and provide more analytics capabilities.
The product basically works on a four-step process: First, data from both offline sources (CRM, ERP, business applications and others) and online sources (including the company Web site or external sources such as Google, Twitter or Facebook) is captured and loaded into industry-specific data models along with master data definitions. Next the data is analyzed to produce information about marketing campaign, brand, product or service, and customer. This analysis is used to deliver information and actions to multiple interaction points (among them the Web, contact centers, stores, kiosks, cell phones and e-mail). Finally it captures the customers’ responses and feeds them back into the data model to help drive the next interaction. This process creates a closed system that is self-learning, which means that future interactions will be based on the very latest information. The system is able to work in real time because Teradata has mixed workload capability to enable its own analytics and those from vendors like IBM SPSS, KXEN and SAS analytics tools to operate in real time, which ensure that the customer is not kept waiting.
Although TRM is focused on marketing, it also fits into what we call customer experience management (CEM). CEM is fundamentally about making the customer experience for any interaction, at any interaction point, as positive as possible while producing the desired business outcome. This can’t be done without first having a complete view of the customer and second delivering the right information to the right interaction point as the customer is interacting with the company. However, my benchmark research into CEM shows that less than one-fifth (17%) of companies believe they are very effective at improving the customer experience. Applying analytics for improving marketing processes can go a long way to addressing your business objectives. I recommend you evaluate TRM to determine how it might help improve your efforts.
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Regards,
Richard Snow – VP & Research Director