Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Adnan Arnautlija
As a follow up to our previous article on effective use of data in marketing communication and IBM’s solutions, we felt it was only natural to speak with one of IBM’s experts on the topic. So we asked Pinar Caglar, IBM Commerce Business Unit Leader for CEE, to tell us a bit more about personalization in advertising, knowing your customer and the ‘human touch’.
Ms Caglar is responsible for driving sales, developing partner network, creating local communities and helping clients to maximize their investments in the IBM Commerce business domain – covering the leading brands of Unica, Silverpop, Sterling, Websphere Commerce, Coremetrics, and Tealeaf in Central & Eastern Europe. Prior to coming to IBM, Ms Caglar already had an impressive record with employers like Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett Packard and Siemens. Prior to her current role at IBM she managed the Enterprise Marketing Management domain for Turkey and Southern Eastern Europe, she developed Digital Marketing and Customer Experience Management business in Turkey and Southern Eastern Europe, and launched many successful projects with banks, retailers and telco’s in this domain – growing business by 200%.
Media Marketing: Personalization – everybody is talking about this, but not everybody is actually doing it. What do you think is stopping companies (CMOs) from doing personalized communication?
Pinar Caglar: There are three main reasons I see: organizational challenges, data/infrastructural challenges, and adaptability to change. Companies are still operating in silos and every business unit has its own priorities and communication with their customers. This makes it hard to create an omni-channel, customer centric experience. Different systems, data inflation and managing the data is also a challenge for many companies. Creating meaningful customer insights from company data is not always easy or agile. Changing the way of doing things is also not easy, resistance to change and adapting to the new processes also keeps CMOs from achieving personalized communication.
Media Marketing: It is much more than just knowing the first and last name of your customer, right? When and where do we encounter opportunities to gather data from people?
Pinar Caglar: Absolutely. Especially in this digital era, we know much more about our customers than ever. They leave their traces on our digital channels. They tell us what they like, what they desire, who they listen to. Being able to analyze, understand and enrich this data with cognitive capabilities, gives us limitless opportunities for better insights about our customers: who they really are, how we can create “perfect moments” for them.
Media Marketing: But can gathering all kinds of data about a customer also be a trap? (not being able to process all the data or doing nothing with it in the end)
Pinar Caglar: This is a big problem that I see in the market at the moment. We have too much data and have limited time and resources to analyze it all to make good use of it. At this point, we need to rely on technology. IBM’s Customer Experience Analytics solutions with cognitive capabilities help our customers to deal with this huge data bulk in a much smarter and agile way.
Media Marketing: What about the human touch? If you work with numbers, locked in an office all day, you lose touch with reality. We can’t reduce people to numbers.
Pinar Caglar: This is a very true concern. We need to create the human touch. If you have a 6 room bed & breakfast hotel, you will know all your customers by heart: their birthdays, favorite color, dog’s name, the last funny story they shared with you etc. – all these personal details. However, it is very difficult to know such details if you have millions of customers you need to serve. At that point, we need to rely on technology. IBM Commerce solutions can give you a platform where you can analyze, interpret all these data from online & offline resources, create patterns and lifecycle events for the best engagement with your customers, at every single touch point they interact with your company. With IBM Commerce solutions we can create a continuous, learning omni-channel experience.
Media Marketing: What would be your advice to a CMO who would like to start implementing personalized communication in their marketing activities?
Pinar Caglar: I would suggest that they prioritize the activities for personalized communications. This priority could be creating fastest additional revenue or optimizing a marketing operation which will help cost reduction. Do something basic and simple but which will effect/fix a communication with the majority of a certain section or a priority section.
Media Marketing: What are the tools that can help here?
Pinar Caglar: IBM Customer Experience Analytics, IBM Marketing Solutions can help here. We have offerings for analytics, omni-channel marketing automation, email marketing, and mobile push marketing solutions under this domain.
Media Marketing: Do you have a personal case study you would like to tell us about (in brief, or a link)
Pinar Caglar: Over the years, I have seen many times how these solutions have created very strong ROI in many banks, telcos, and retail companies in this region. One of the most interesting was a hairdressing company that invested in our solutions and got amazing returns. It made me think again, that this was not about being a big & complex organization, but about being visionary, understanding how technology can help you to create “perfect moments” for your customers. Utilizing it with the right content and focus will also help you to generate more revenue and to reduce the costs of new customer acquisition.