Have you seen The Customer Experience Factbook?

In this 180+ page report, you'll find all the information and support you need to build a profitable, effective CX Improvement Program that spans every part of your business. You'll be able to implement and manage meaningful and profitable change, and grow your bottom line despite a slowing economy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

How NoSQL can bridge from CMO to CIO

As Ian White, CTO for Sailthru, explains, shaking off the constraints of legacy database technology and embracing NoSQL can help bridge the gap between IT and Marketing to deliver amazing insights and results.

Today, both the CIO and the CMO share the same fundamental challenge - effective information management. Whether engineering a big data strategy or seeking a single customer view, the objective is the same: making sense of the rapid increase in information, and managing the impact it is having on data storage, assets, and analysis.

Many older technologies, however, are no longer ideal for modern use cases. Most companies are still using SQL-based relational databases to store customer information. And relational databases, now entering their fifth decade, still remain useful for the transactional activities they were designed to support.

But the relational data model - fixed predefined columns joined across many tables - is showing its age, in the face of the explosion of big data and its 'three Vs': Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Each of the three Vs are required to build a robust dataset that spans a complete customer lifetime:

1. Volume
   There is far more information available than before. Activity on websites, in mobile devices, and in physical locations all tell the story of a customer.
2. Velocity
   A single brand with a customer base in the tens of millions can easily be generating thousands of new data points per second.
3. Variety
   Companies' needs are evolving more quickly than ever before, as new technologies and channels, like the Internet of Things, create new types of customer data.

It's especially that last 'V' where the SQL model really struggles. Often, faced with new requirements, rather than conduct a painful re-architecture of an existing relational database, the CIO is forced to create new databases that meet the new requirements: silos.

But silos create significant overhead in the form of lengthy ETL (Extract, Translate, Load) processes that sync data - leading to delays that impose restrictions on what brands can do with customer information. More fundamentally, relational silos undermine the ability to form a single view of the customer.

The SQL model simply cannot respond to constant change, and places too many constraints on marketers. And in a digital world where customers expect to interact across a range of platforms and demand an instant response, this type of technology is no longer enough.

Bringing it all together
Both CMOs and CIOs need a solid foundation to work together. To make sense of all this customer information they need a technology that can handle diverse data sources, types and structures. NoSQL databases do just that. Not having a pre-defined columnar schema allows for much more flexibility. It becomes possible to ingest new data from new sources without fundamentally refactoring the data model or creating additional tables.

For companies creating a multi-channel customer experience, this flexibility can be critical. CMOs gain the ability to access and analyse data, which they can instantly act upon, whether communicating to customers in real-time or forming the basis through which they can identify trends in customer behaviour in the long-term.

NoSQL databases also are built for scale. Of course, SQL databases can scale with enough care put into the access patterns, but most weren't inherently designed for horizontal distribution across multiple servers or datacentres. Many NoSQL data stores were built for this purpose, so CIOs can store a truly huge amount of data and access it quickly. It also means they can share information across multiple locations, with the integrity of the data intact.

Customer Engagement
Building a user-centric data asset is critical to achieving customer engagement. Consumers' attention spans have diminished, and expectations for customer experience are higher. If a brand doesn't engage with its audience, it will go somewhere else.

The opportunity cost for not using big data isn't easy to calculate, but brands that have used big data report savings of up to 90% in areas such as storage, according to research from eMarketer¹. By using customer data to intelligently know and retain more customers, brands can dramatically increase profitability. In some cases just a 5% jump in retention can net anywhere from 25% - 125% increase in profits.

A very thin line
According to Gartner, by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO - suggesting the traditional boundary between these roles is already blurring. As more data is generated across a number of channels, the importance of gaining a single view of the customer and harnessing all available data across departments will only continue to grow.

"Successful companies will be the ones who get the customer experience right. NoSQL provides the foundation for both technology and marketing, both now and in the future," concluded White.

Have you seen The Customer Experience Factbook?

In this 180+ page report, you'll find all the information and support you need to build a profitable, effective CX Improvement Program that spans every part of your business.

You'll be able to implement and manage meaningful and profitable change, and grow your bottom line despite a slowing economy. Grab this goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, technologies, research, suppliers and partners, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid CX strategy.

While most marketers could list maybe a dozen key points for improving their brand's Customer Experience (CX), the researchers and writers at The Marketing Factbook have identified FORTY main 'CX Keys' which will help you drive your customers to new levels of delight, loyalty, advocacy and profitability.

The areas in which customers have direct contact with your organization are perhaps the most obvious places in which CX improvements can be made, and this report addresses all 24 of these 'Direct CX Keys', applicable to offline and online businesses alike.

At the same time there are many other areas that indirectly affect CX (such as the supply chain, policies and processes) in which every business can make simple but far-reaching improvements. This report guides you through the problems and solutions for all 16 of these 'Indirect CX Keys', many of which are often forgotten or under-played even in the best CX strategies.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)