PivotLink recently announced the latest addition to its analytic offerings, Customer PerformanceMETRIX™. There are several reasons that I am particularly excited by this release, but first I’d like to tell a short story.
Imagine this scenario: You are eating lunch in the office breakroom when Carl, one of your colleagues from the IT team, joins you at the table. Carl prefers being called a “Data Scientist”, and he likes to proclaim that the business would be lost without his analytic skills. Carl tends to talk about arcane technical topics regardless of the person he is speaking with, and on this day you are on the receiving end. Carl is going on and on about “big data” analytics, and how the company is going to become more informed because of the work he is doing with “Hadoop”, “R” and “MapReduce”. You have no idea what he is talking about and are left with a couple options:
- Quickly finish your sandwich, excuse yourself and purge Carl from your short-term memory.
- Stare out the window and think about your upcoming vacation, while occasionally nodding in agreement whenever Carl pauses to take a breath.
- Interrupt Carl and ask him when he is going to deliver the new reports you have been waiting for the past 3 months.
This story illustrates a common situation – a dissonance between the technologists and the people who need information controlled by the technologists. I don’t want to dismiss the work that people like Carl are doing, but too often there is either a reluctance or an inability to make analytics technology accessible without requiring highly specialized skills – this brings me back to the topic of Customer PerformanceMETRIX (CPM). The whole idea behind CPM is leveraging big data analytics in a way that provides the technological benefits without the requirement of being a Data Scientist.
What exactly is this application? Customer PerformanceMETRIX is designed to allow Marketing, Sales, Merchandising, and other line-of-business teams to segment their customer data from various sources into groups based on similar characteristics – these groupings can then be used to increase the effectiveness and return on promotions, cross/up-sell offers, loyalty programs, etc. While CPM utilizes sophisticated data processing technologies to provide multiple levels of insight, it is designed as a self-service analytics application for business users to understand their customer data using a point-and-click interface. In literally 10 minutes, anybody can learn to use CPM to intelligently group their customers based on any attribute in the data. In addition, since CPM is a SaaS-based application, the data that is brought into the PivotLink analytics cloud can be enhanced with additional attributes that PivotLink can provide through 3rd-party partnerships.
Disintermediation is a term that was widely used as the internet became accessible to the masses, referring to “the elimination of an intermediary in a transaction between two parties” (Merriam-Webster). CPM brings disintermediation to business people who want to improve their understanding of customer behavior without having to get an advanced degree in analytics or wait for a Data Scientist to provide them the information they need to make informed, actionable decisions. Power to the People!
