Spam your customer

My day job involves helping my customers enhance the shopper and engagement experience of their customers when they shop online or at their stores. A lot of effort and resource is invested by my customers to understand as much as possible about their customers through intelligent analytics, personalized offers, understanding the customer preferences and customizing offers that suit individual tastes, choices and budgetary considerations. Data is right at the centre of all these initiatives and often forms the core of their marketing and promotional strategy. Typical sources of such data collection are social media streams, feedback surveys, and transactional data from the multiple channels that customers use to communicate with the brand. This, you can probably imagine has shifted the power of control from the business owners to the customer.

I have been involved in testing data analytics of various hues and complexity for about 18 years now and the journey that began with Excel based analytics tool that could do everything you needed to do back then viz. summarise, visualise and manipulate data as part of basic day to day analytics. With data becoming more valuable and an expensive commodity that many enterprises run on today, the need for tools that can analyse this data providing you the right context and knowledge required to address a business problem.  I have since spent much time working on architecting and testing solutions using IBM Cognos, Splunk, SAP BO, Apache Spark, SAS Enterprise Miner and Visual Analytics and Tableau for retailers, consumer goods, Digital marketing companies and High street banks and Insurance companies

After many years in this industry, I often reflect on my own experience as a customer and how my data is being used by the numerous businesses that have almost unrestricted access to my data all the way from a simple cookie on my browser or that a data broker might have collected and shared with digital marketers. A recent instance of usage of this data triggered a number of questions in my mind. Recently my  mobile service provider of nearly 20 years sent me a barrage of text messages luring me with an offer of a chance to win a possible trip to Goa (an exotic seaside location in India) and a hundred thousand rupees along with gold (yes!) thrown in if I subscribed to a caller tune service (A caller tune service is fairly popular in India where subscribers can choose what music/song your caller can listen to until their call is answered) – Nothing wrong with the service as such. However what baffles me is the fact that after 20 years of providing me a mobile telephone service, how much of my needs does my service provider understand when they flood me with such offers – For one, I could do with international roaming and extra mobile data that helps me conduct my business when traveling and equally importantly be connected with my family. Now, this would be really clever if only they understood my needs from the data from my service usage every time my phone recognizes a foreign mobile network when I am outside my city, state and country over trying to induce me into buying a service that I or my callers would ever appreciate .

So why does this not work as envisioned – Are all the intelligence built around these technologies proving to be an irritant? I would tend to argue that there has not been sufficient effort to understand the human aspect of data analytics as it is too tempting to believe that numerical science over human fallibility and even data can be subjective. So a 40 something mid-management professional would need something more relevant than machine driven ‘artificial’ intelligence. In the meantime, just call me and ask!