Analytics technology can help businesses to transform the customer experience but to achieve its full potential, IT and marketing must work together.

1. Unlock the business
benefits of digitisation
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Analytics technology is allowing businesses to serve and interact with
their customers in innovative ways. Cutting-edge businesses are using the
technology for activities as diverse as picking up early warnings of design
failures from users’ tweets or providing customers with real-time mobile alerts
on their flight bookings.
However, the technology can be culturally disruptive; for analytics to be fully
exploited, CIOs and chief digital officers (CDOs) must cross corporate boundaries
to work in partnership with other executives, particularly chief marketing officers.
Consulting group Booz & Company argues that understanding this “digitisation
imperative” is essential to unlocking competitive advantage and business
benefits. Regardless of industry, companies will depend on mature and cutting-
edge information technologies to connect with customers, suppliers and
employees to stay competitive and succeed.
Richard Bhanap, partner at Booz & Co and co-lead of its UK Digital Business
& Technology practice, says organisations need to accept that digitisation,
including data analytics, is a fundamental part of the new business model,
affecting every corner of the business.
“When you talk about digital today, companies recognise the world is changing
and new technologies and new ways of using technologies are changing the
way customers and employees are behaving,” he says.
Today, the focus of digitisation is on the consumer interface, with obvious
players being retailers and e-tailers; and consumer products and service
companies wanting to get closer to their customers.
Analytics technology can help businesses to transform the customer experience but to
achieve its full potential, IT and marketing must work together, writes Lisa Kelly
Time to embrace the digital world

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“Many companies have an omnichannel presence and are leveraging mobile
because there is a huge overlap between digitisation and mobile. They want to
understand their product proposition and are spending on digital commerce,
digital channels and digital marketing,” says Bhanap.
However, he predicts digital technology will soon stretch across the enterprise
as the benefits of analytics and big data are applied to the supply chain.
“Digitisation today is at the front end and the customer interface, but it will apply
across the value chain and create new ways of doing business and new sources
of revenue. Digital will be in the fabric of business,” adds Bhanap.
Collaboration between IT and marketing
The CIO is well placed to drive the transformation to customer analytics, he
says, but the big stumbling block is the gulf between the CIO and the chief
marketing officer (CMO).
“It is remarkable how much technology spend is channelled through marketing,
for example, on digital communities. The real challenge is frustration with any
CIO who focuses on automating the back office and not on new ways to
engage with the customer,” says Bhanap.
This hiatus is leading to the rise of the CDO to drive the agenda in a growing
number of organisations.
“There is often a disconnect between IT and marketing. A huge number of
CDOs are being created in marketing organisations. Unless they are digitally
business savvy, there is a risk the CIO could be marginalised,” says Bhanap.
“Unless they are
digitally business
savvy, there is a risk
the CIO could be
marginalised”
Richard Bhanap,
Booz & Co
Network operator uses analytics to drive profitable customer offers
Erez Yakoni, senior vice president, CIO, T-Mobile USA,
highlights the importance of analytics in understanding
your customer in a fast-paced world where interacting
means having to react quickly to drive both customer and
business benefit.
The network operator faced the challenge of managing
its churn rates, while maintaining profitability. Offering
better pricing options provides better value for customers,
but potentially erodes revenues.
To overcome this, T-Mobile USA implemented a SAP
Hana and HP platform. Analysis of mobile data enabled it
to make the right offers to the right customer base, creating
a win-win situation by providing innovative services to its
customers while also making money.
“To drive that into our base, we needed to do a lot of
analytics; understanding who in the base is fitted for the
offers. That type of analytics is fairly heavy from a datasets
perspective and the raw data you have to crunch and put
together,” says Yakoni.
Dealing with massive datasets and different elements of
the customer base “takes a lot more horsepower to get to
the answer”, he adds.
The network operator wanted to be able to put an offer
out and measure quickly how it is accepted and how it is
rejected; for example, putting two sets of offers into
different geographies to build nuances and try to
understand the differences. “It created a lot of data coming
back at us very quickly and the need to respond to that
data very quickly. Once you engage with the customer, you
can no longer take your time,” says Yakoni.
Traditionally, the process of running queries and
analysing data could take weeks. “Single tasks could take
up to three days to crunch data,” says Yakoni.
Deploying the SAP Hana on top of the HP platform has
reduced that to 15 minutes. The operator now has the
ability to analyse huge data volumes and make complex
offers, which was not possible on existing platforms.
“We weren’t able to do the iterative process – the timelines
were not there and the offers would become stale and
customers become uninterested. You have to strike while
the iron’s hot. We have been able to drive a lot more
sophistication into our offer process than we could before,”
he says.
Using analytics has increased revenues; Yakoni says
customer acquisition value was $35m at the year end and
over the lifetime of the platform it will be hundreds of
millions more. Analytics has proved to be innovative
and invaluable.
“We like to use innovative technology to give ourselves a
competitive edge,” says Yakoni.

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Analyst group Gartner predicts that by 2015, a quarter of all companies will have
a CDO. “Today, 5-6% of businesses worldwide have a CDO and that figure will
triple within a year. It is on a really fast, crazy trajectory,” says Dave Aron, Gartner
fellow in the CIO research group.
However, a digitally savvy CIO is the best placed to help companies exploit
analytics technology to reach their customers.
“Many companies are embracing the digital world and creating new sites and
apps to connect with customers. The difficulty is when a new digital community
needs to be integrated into enterprise systems, such as the corporate CRM
system,” says Bhanap.
Analytics technology, big data, cloud-based systems will mature and create
exciting new businesses, he predicts. “We will see a revolution and new
business models created. Not everyone will succeed, but CIOs need to move
quickly, spend wisely and not be afraid to fail, because they will learn and gain
experience to be able to fully exploit analytics and big data,” says Bhanap.
True grit
One company that sees the value of using big data to transform the customer
interface is risk management specialist Gritit, which provides gritting and snow
clearance services. IT director Brendon Petsch says the company, which has
doubled in size over the past six years, focuses heavily on customer service.
Gritit imports weather data, using historic data to predict trends, but also
analyses data in real time. “We use data from our onboard computers to give us
a more detailed picture of what is happening at sites to guarantee servicing. By
checking and cross-referencing PDA data and GPS data, we can have 100%
confidence that a service is completed, which can stand up in court if there is a
compensation claim,” says Petsch.
Gritit is now looking at using mobile apps to allow clients to interact with the
company and to check up on service information when they choose. “Much
of our work is done between 6pm and 6am, so 90% of the time we are not
seen. We used to get phone calls asking, ‘Have you been?’, but now we send
all the report data relevant to the individual client via email or a portal. We are
looking into app notification because we are always trying to find better value for
clients,” says Petsch.
Right priorities
The question for many businesses is which steps to take with data analytics.
“There are so many potential opportunities; picking the right priorities is a
problem as well as an opportunity,” says Andrew Horne, a managing director of
the CEB CIO Leadership Council.
He suggests the CIO can help to prioritise. Many companies are already
forging ahead with digital projects, including a car maker that monitors
references to its brand on Facebook for more targeted campaigns; a
business-to-business technical company that monitors complaints in
chatrooms and links this data to client accounts to ensure a better service;
and a global supply company that uses big data to model every conceivable
disruption scenario such as floods, which could knock out production.
Horne acknowledges the tension between CIOs and CMOs: “Heads of
marketing don’t want run big IT groups, but they do want to be able to quickly
experiment with big data.”
“Heads of
marketing don’t
want run big IT
groups, but they do
want to be able to
quickly experiment
with big data”
Andrew Horne, CEB CIO
Leadership Council

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He suggests that CIOs and CDOs actively make it easier for the CMO and the
business to experiment with analytics. “Companies need a flexible IT team that
can have different on-ramps, for example, working with IT from the start or
working with external advertising agencies and then handing it over to IT to run.
It is in no one’s interest to say, ‘This is mine – not yours’, but the message has
to cascade down to junior members of the IT department,” says Horne.
He believes the key skills in a digital future are flexibility and making people feel
that they can ask for help: “Good team working and collaboration skills are key;
and on the tech side, skills around prototyping to create a good user experience
early on are essential.
“Big data has put pressure on the IT team to help data to be exploited rather
than providing all the tools to do the exploiting. The CIO can help with training
and user coaching, to avoid mistakes in misinterpreting. Analysing big data
works best in a collaborative environment,” Horne concludes.
Making sense of big data for closer collaboration with fans
and sponsors is at the heart of NASCAR’s (National
Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) Fan and Media
Engagement Centre, which it developed in partnership
with HP.
The centre in North Carolina is a hub for interaction with
fans and partners, which allows better decisions to be
made based on sharp insights, by being able to react to
data from multiple sources.
NASCAR is able to exploit digital information and extract
intelligence from many formats, including capturing millions
of social media conversations, from sources such as
Twitter and Facebook, as well as more traditional forms of
media data, such as print and radio and aggregating the
results in real time. Once unlocked, core messages
surrounding a NASCAR race can be acted upon.
Brian France, chairman and CEO of NASCAR, says: “The
Fan and Media Engagement Centre is the technology
breakthrough that allows us to stay much more connected
to our fans in ways that we could never have dreamed of 10
or 15 years ago.”
NASCAR chief marketing officer, Steve Phelps,
says: “NASCAR has a broader fan base, and a more
diverse and the largest sponsor base of any sport out
there; so for us to get insights that will allow them to
understand how they can achieve a stronger ROI is
investment-critical.”
He says the aim of working with HP focused on NASCAR
understanding what is happening with its fan base.
“We’re doing something with HP that’s never been done
before. Our vision was to hear about the dialogue that was
happening within NASCAR. What’s the tenor of it? What
does it look like? What’s being said? And then be able to
react to that. It’s about us doing something for our entire
ecosystem – for our drivers, for our teams. It’s really about
serving the fans,” says Phelps.
HP built an end-to-end solution for NASCAR –
incorporating software, consulting services, and hardware.
Steve Worling, senior director of IT at NASCAR, says
bringing all the diverse media data together as a single
source of data is just one part of the equation.
“My biggest challenge is how we take all that
unstructured data and feed it back into NASCAR
datacentres and get it all into something that makes
sense,” he says.
Phelps agrees that knowledge is different from
information. “It’s not enough to just get the data – then you
have to use the data,” he says.
Phelps says HP has developed the tools to be able to
look at what is happening and then being able to react.
“Whether it’s from a fan perspective and what the fans
are saying, or from a media perspective and what the
media are saying about our sport. Those are important
things for us to be able to give to our sponsor base and
allow them to track their ROI,” he says.
Bringing separate data strands together and stitching
them together is critical for a bigger picture, says Worling.
The technology creates “a single pane of glass story that
helps us understand what’s being talked about across the
ecosystem of the sport”, he says.
Interesting content can then be served in an
appropriate way.
Worling says the centre brings a new kind of touch to
partners, sponsors, tracks, and teams that was not
possible before the partnership with HP.
“It wasn’t just about the services, or the hardware, or the
software solution. It was the fact HP delivered on all three
of those stacks. It was a seamless integration solution that
they could deliver on and manage internally,” he says.
Looking forward, France is confident about the role of
big data and the centre for NASCAR.
“This allows us to get a head start on what is obviously
going to be the next frontier of digital media and social
media. We’ll get better as the technology gets richer and
better, and the sport will be on the cutting edge of this,”
he says.
Case study: NASCAR