by Richard Snow |
4/11/2008 | Article ID: M08-15 | Article Type: VentanaMonitor
Summary
Teradata is known for its data warehouse technology and for offerings that address critical business intelligence and enterprise needs. Yet it also has staked out a position in the market for customer management (CM) applications. Through a series of partnerships, including with Infor, as well as internal development, Teradata has been putting together a product portfolio that supports many customer-facing processes and related reporting requirements. This is especially true for marketing, where its Enterprise Offer Management (EOM) suite supports the full marketing cycle. The latest addition, obtained in a new partnership with Infinian, enables sending highly personalized messages to customers through cell phones. However, Ventana Research believes that companies going down this path need to be cognizant of regulatory legislation and the danger of becoming a source of spam for cellular communications. To avoid these risks, companies must ensure that such messages are relevant, timely and personalized – in a word, welcome. Teradata EOM enables this approach, and companies should consider the option as part of their customer management initiatives.
Assessment
In trying to effectively manage their customer-focused strategy and processes, many companies struggle with two key issues. First, they don’t have a single (“golden”) source of customer data. Benchmark research from Ventana Research shows that many companies store customer data in as many as 20 different systems and that a significant percentage of them have multiple versions of the same system. When customer data is distributed over many discrete systems, data quality is suspect, data is inconsistent across systems, and ultimately companies don’t have a single reliable source of information about their customers. These issues play to Teradata’s traditional strengths as its customer management products and data warehousing support the production of a single view of the customer.
On top of these core products, through a combination of strategic partnerships with companies such as Infor and internal developments, Teradata offers an extended enterprise marketing portfolio. It includes products such as Teradata Relationship Manager, Marketing Resource Management and Interaction Advisor. All support marketing functionality such as designing campaigns, selecting target recipients, delivering the campaign through several channels of communication, managing and reporting on the whole process, determining which message to deliver to which customer and analytic tools to monitor and assess the success of campaigns.
One of the key differentiators for Teradata is the ability to deliver campaign messages through different channels such as e-mail, the Web site, point-of-sale terminals and even electronic fuel pumps. Through the partnership with Infinian, Teradata has added text messaging as another channel. Infinian has developed proprietary software that essentially reformats marketing messages so they can be delivered to wireless handsets. And it can do this in “smart” ways. For example, once a person has signed up for service, the system can register personal preferences, and once it receives notice of the customer’s presence – say, in a shop – it can send personalized messages and offer discounts available in that shop. It could even display a bar code to swipe against a reader to redeem special offers. The initial target market for this service is the retail sector, but it likely will be extended to others.
Market Impact
Ventana Research believes that over the next 12 months more companies will realize the shortcomings of their traditional approaches to customer relationship management and recognize that the customer experience – at every touch point – has the strongest impact on customers’ behavior, levels of satisfaction and degrees of loyalty. Coupled with new legislation that prevents many forms of unsolicited marketing, this realization means that companies must devise new ways of reaching customers. Ventana Research believes that the keys to success in finding new ways will be better targeting and personalization of campaigns and complete views of why some are more successful. Teradata Enterprise Offer Management supports all these functions and supports the full cycle of creating and maintaining customer data, profiles and analytics, making offers based on personalized versions of prebuilt campaigns, delivering messages to the customer’s channel of choice, and generating real-time feedback and “conversations” based on customers’ responses. This area is outside Teradata’s core strengths, but if it can convince potential customers that it is committed to the market and communicate effectively the capabilities of the product range, it may capture a large portion of this emerging market.
Recommendation
Consumer research shows that in many markets customers that have one bad experience on the phone or at a Web site are one step away from deserting companies, underscoring that it is the customer experience that ultimately determines whether a customer remains loyal and spends more with a company. Nowhere is this more true than in marketing and sales processes; if companies make these experiences relevant, personal and timely, customers likely will remain loyal and continue to spend with them. Channels of communication are also vital to the customer experience. As more people work and play on the move, getting messages to them through their cell phones will become increasing important: Benchmark research by Ventana Research shows that after the Web the fastest-growing channel for customer communications is the cell phone. Teradata’s EOM products put it in a strong position to help companies address these challenges. We recommend that companies consider them, not just for sending marketing messages but for other targeted information as well.
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