| | November 20168CIOReviewHow Technology Is Revolutionizing the Integration of Unstructured Data By Onyeka Nchege, CIO, Interstate BatteriesIn terms of reporting and analytics, technology is revolutionizing the integration of unstructured data (i.e. social, news feeds, weather, among others) and structured data (data warehouses, data marts, to name a few) to help answer questions about--and inform--our understanding of our consumers. For example, we now have access to information pertaining to `how' and `when' the consumer found out about us. We now know all about what they are shopping for, what is driving their purchase decisions, we can predict their behaviors, and of course, we have access to product or service feedback. All of that can be used to better inform our corporate marketing and sales strategies, providing detail-oriented information that enables us to personalize the consumer experience to make it mutually beneficial. Similarly, e-commerce has made it possible for us to deliver an exceptional and consistent customer experience, executed flawlessly via web, mobile and store. Technology breakthroughs in e-commerce have given us access to information pertaining to location-specific product information, inventory numbers, online shopping, buying, and shipping, alternative product offerings and customer-specific add-on recommendations. Besides, technology has totally reinvented the way we approach online payment. It is all about having the customer at the core of our business operations. We are laser-focused on the customer experience. We are focused on leveraging both mobile pay and mobile checkout, ultimately trickling down to a faster in-store checkout experience. We are focused on acknowledging customers by name when entering a store (i.e. cell phone ID, key fob RFIDs), yet real-time advertising has barely started to scratch the surface in-store and on mobile. We continue to focus on leveraging analytics (and automation) more effectively via self-service tools utilized by data-driven business leaders and business intelligence analysts who bring targeted business expertise and provide high value insights to business leaders when master, transaction, and customer data is efficiently and effectively integrated. In short, technology is enabling, not disabling key operational processes and procedures.IN MY OPINION
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