http://www.marketingarchitects.

com/2010/12/3-steps-to-understanding-consumer-behaviorthrough-analytics/

Three Steps to Understanding Consumer Behavior Through Analytics Consumer behavior is constantly changing. How can you be one step ahead of your customers choices as they change their minds with each passing variable? There is always the survey or focus group to gain information about your customers. But at Marketing Architects, were in the direct response business; every interaction we have with a customer creates a data point about behavior. And although data is important in telling us what customers are doing, data is nothing without insight our specialty. Choosing the direct response marketing path in order to understand customers is your fastest route to funnel customer behavior and insights into ongoing sales. We use analytics as the foundation of our full-circle, three-step approach: 1. Learn from customer actions Every encounter with a customer is an opportunity to gather information. For example, our proprietary interactive voice response system, Voc, gets to know the behavior of customers within hours of launching a campaign. Tracking where an ad ran, which station it ran on and the exact time and market, the automated system interacts with each customer to collect and provide information and, ultimately, answer the question, What offer will take this particular caller to purchase? Each encounter collects more customized data,and over time,the customer is led down a personalized sales funnel. The automated system is constantly collecting so much customer insight that the next step is to pinpoint trends to focus on increasing personalized conversion. 2. Take customer insight to the next level Again, data is great, but its nothing without insight. Most companies think their job is done once the customer calls in. We consider a call to be just the beginning. Voc tracks customer purchase behavior and focuses your path on what can be done today to increase conversion. After digging through the analytics and finding points where conversion can be higher, we then monitor calls for behavior and ask customers questions to gain qualitative insight. We continue to adjust scripts and creative until the conversion is peaking. So now that we have customers calling back to purchase, how do we ensure a customer stays a customer? 3. Hold onto customers This is when the full-circle approach comes into play. We dont stop once the customer has the product in hand. We work with clients on customer service feedback and continue to adjust the campaigns overall strategy. We are constantly evaluating shifts in consumer behavior, sales trends and success of a campaign to impact lifetime value. Every day, our analytics team is working on the past, present and future to get to know our clients customers better and better. Best of all, this information is available in a real-time

dashboard to clients. I might be biased, but Id say this approach always beats an occasional customer survey or focus group. - See more at: http://www.marketingarchitects.com/2010/12/3-steps-to-understandingconsumer-behavior-through-analytics/#sthash.bvBZ9t8j.dpuf

http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/hp-mines-data-to-predictconsumer-behavi/231901831

HP Mines Data To Predict Consumer Behavior

David F. Carr See more from David Connect directly with David: Bio | Contact Pilot project was right 90% of the time when social media data was combined with company data.

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Slideshow: 10 Cool Social Media Monitoring Tools (click image for larger view and for slideshow) The combination of social media analytics with company data predicted customer behavior with up to 90% accuracy in a pilot project completed by HP Labs and HP Global Customer Intelligence, the company said. Though HP has not announced any specific product plans based on thesefindings, it is expanding the use of the technology within its own operations and exploring similar pilot projects with some of its large customers. HP called its pilot Project Fusion because it combines two different kinds of data. One is unstructured data, including Amazon.com reviews, customer surveys, and other textual data. The other is structured data, such as customer support tickets, sales transactions, and customer demographics.

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Take the InformationWeek 2013 Database Technology Survey Agile Business Analytics: Five Critical Elements More >> Using HP Labs' new text analytics technology, the team first converted the unstructured data into a structured format. Analysts then used standard data-mining and statistical tools to analyze the combined data sets. In one case, social signals predicted support tickets with 90% accuracy. HP also uncovered high correlations between social signals and product sales. [Even Twitter can reveal consumer intentions. Read more atDo Tweets Predict the Future?] Prasanna Dhore, vice president of customer intelligence at HP, said the kind of analysis his group is doing goes beyond the general measurement of "buzz," which has been the primary market research application of social media monitoring to date. "The results are significant enough to act on," he said. For example, by correlating social media complaints about a product feature that is not working correctly with customer support trouble tickets, an

organization could intelligently modify its call center staffing plans to ensure enough of the right people to handle those complaints are on duty, he said. One way the HP team made social data analysis more meaningful was to drive the analysis to a deeper level of granularity, Dhore said in an interview. As an example, he points to this comment culled from customer reviews: "I don't know what people are complaining about regarding the software but it installed seamlessly and is intuitive in its operations. Even though I am dissatisfied with the paper tray, all together I am happy with this printer." There are several sentiments expressed in that one comment--about the software, the paper tray, and the customer's overall impression. Rather than doing sentiment analysis on the statement as a whole, HP designed its analysis to score statements about each aspect of the product separately. To accomplish this, HP went through the process of identifying key aspects of the printer analyzed during the pilot project so it could see what people were saying about the ink, the print head, the setup, the paper tray, the print quality, and so on. Another way of applying this data is as feedback to product development, Dhore said. For example, if people are generally happy with the print quality, it might be time to divert more resources to something they are less satisfied with, such as the setup process. Similarly, HP can apply the same type of analysis to competitive products, so if one that consumers are comparing HP's offering against has dramatically better print quality, the company can investigate to see what that competitor is doing right, he said. Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst at Forrester Research focused on "social intelligence" and practical applications of big data analytics, said HP's efforts dovetail with his predictions in a report on integrating social and customer data. "Today, there are the listening parts of the organization and the data parts of the organization--that won't be the case in the future," Hofer-Shall said in an interview. Social media monitoring is typically owned by the marketing organization, while company data is controlled by IT, but the two camps need to bring the data together to use it to maximum effect, he said. Though matching social media profiles to specific customer records can be difficult, HP's examples show how social data about general sentiments and trends can be useful even in the absence of that matching, he said. Hofer-Shall said he will be interested to see how HP's recent acquisition of Autonomy plays into its social media analytics plans, because Autonomy brings many relevant search and text analytics technologies to the table. Dhore's pilot project predated that acquisition and was based on HP's own software development. Attend Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara, Nov. 14-17, 2011, and learn how to drive business value with collaboration, with an emphasis on how real customers are using social software to enable more productive workforces and to be more responsive and engaged with customers and business partners. Register today and save 30% off conference passes, or get a free expo pass with priority code CPHCES02. Find out more and register.