predictive analytics

How does a marketer know what to test?

--Digital Marketing, A/B Testing, customer analytics, Digital Analytics, Digital Intelligence, Multi-arm Bandit Testing, multivariate testing, personalization, predictive analytics No Responses »

8月 122017

Optimization is a core competency for digital marketers. As customer interactions spread across fragmented touch points and consumers demand seamless and relevant experiences, content-oriented marketers have been forced to re-evaluate their strategies for engagement. But the complexity, pace and volume of modern digital marketing easily overwhelms traditional planning and design approaches that rely on historical conventions, myopic single-channel perspectives and sequential act-and-learn iteration.

SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Engage was released last year to address our client needs for a variety of modern marketing challenges. Part of the software's capabilities revolve around:

Regardless of the method, testing is attractive because it is efficient, measurable and serves as a machete cutting through the noise and assumptions associated with delivering effective experiences. The question is: How does a marketer know what to test?

There are so many possibilities. Let's be honest - if it's one thing marketers are good at, it's being creative. Ideas flow out of brainstorming meetings, bright minds flourish with motivation and campaign concepts are born. As a data and analytics geek, I've worked with ad agencies and client-side marketing teams on the importance of connecting the dots between the world of predictive analytics (and more recently machine learning) with the creative process. Take a moment to reflect on the concept of ideation.

Is it feasible to have too many ideas to practically try them all? How do you prioritize? Wouldn't it be awesome if a statistical model could help?

Let's break this down:

Predictive analytic or machine learning projects always begin with data. Specifically training data which is fed to algorithms to address an important business question.
Ultimately, at the end of this exercise, a recommendation can be made prescriptively to a marketer to take action. This is what we refer to as a hypothesis. It is ready to be tested in-market.
This is the connection point between analytics and testing. Just because a statistical model informs us to do something slightly different, it still needs to be tested before we can celebrate.

Here is the really sweet part. The space of visual analytics has matured dramatically. Creative minds dreaming of the next digital experience cannot be held back by hard-to-understand statistical greek. Nor can I condone the idea that if a magical analytic easy-button is accessible in your marketing cloud, one doesn't need to understand what's going on behind the scene.That last sentence is my personal opinion, and feel free to dive into my mind here.

Want a simple example? Of course you do. I'm sitting in a meeting with a bunch of creatives. They are debating on which pages should they run optimization tests on their website. Should it be on one of the top 10 most visited pages? That's an easy web analytic report to run. However, are those the 10 most important pages with respect to a conversion goal? That's where the analyst can step up and help. Here's a snapshot of a gradient boosting machine learning model I built in a few clicks with SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning leveraging sas.com website data collected by SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Discover on what drives conversions.

I know what you're thinking. Cool data viz picture. So what? Take a closer look at this...

The model prioritizes what is important. This is critical, as I have transparently highlighted (with statistical vigor I might add) that site visitor interest in our SAS Customer Intelligence product page is popping as an important predictor in what drives conversions. Now what?

The creative masterminds and I agree we should test various ideas on how to optimize the performance of this important web page. A/B test? Multivariate test? As my SAS colleague Malcolm Lightbody stated:

"Multivariate testing is the way to go when you want to understand how multiple web page elements interact with each other to influence goal conversion rate. A web page is a complex assortment of content and it is intuitive to expect that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So, why is MVT less prominent in the web marketer’s toolkit?

One major reason – cost. In terms of traffic and opportunity cost, there is a combinatoric explosion in unique versions of a page as the number of elements and their associated levels increase. For example, a page with four content spots, each of which have four possible creatives, leads to a total of 256 distinct versions of that page to test.

If you want to be confident in the test results, then you need each combination, or variant, to be shown to a reasonable sample size of visitors. In this case, assume this to be 10,000 visitors per variant, leading to 2.56 million visitors for the entire test. That might take 100 or more days on a reasonably busy site. But by that time, not only will the marketer have lost interest – the test results will likely be irrelevant."

SAS Customer Intelligence 360 provides a business-user interface which allows the user to:

Set up a multivariate test.
Define exclusion and inclusion rules for specific variants.
Optimize the design.
Place it into production.
Examine the results and take action.

Continuing with my story, we decide to set up a test on the sas.com customer intelligence product page with four content spots, and three creatives per spot. This results in 81 total variants and an estimated sample size of 1,073,000 visits to get a significant read at a 90 percent confidence level.

Notice that Optimize button in the image? Let's talk about the amazing special sauce beneath it. Methodical experimentation has many applications for efficient and effective information gathering. To reveal or model relationships between an input, or factor, and an output, or response, the best approach is to deliberately change the former and see whether the latter changes, too. Actively manipulating factors according to a pre-specified design is the best way to gain useful, new understanding.

However, whenever there is more than one factor – that is, in almost all real-world situations – a design that changes just one factor at a time is inefficient. To properly uncover how factors jointly affect the response, marketers have numerous flavors of multivariate test designs to consider. Factorial experimental designs are more common, such as full factorial, fractional factorial, and mixed-level factorial. The challenge here is each method has strict requirements.

This leads to designs that, for example, are not orthogonal or that have irregular design spaces. Over a number of years SAS has developed a solution to this problem. This is contained within the OPTEX procedure, and allows testing of designs for which:

Not all combinations of the factor levels are feasible.
The region of experimentation is irregularly shaped.
Resource limitations restrict the number of experiments that can be performed.
There is a nonstandard linear or a nonlinear model.

The OPTEX procedure can generate an efﬁcient experimental design for any of these situations and website (or mobile app) multivariate testing is an ideal candidate because it applies:

Constraints on the number of variants that are practical to test.
Constraints on required or forbidden combinations of content.

The OPTEX procedure is highly flexible and has many input parameters and options. This means that it can cover different digital marketing scenarios, and it’s use can be tuned as circumstances demand. Customer Intelligence 360 provides the analytic heavy lifting behind the scenes, and the marketer only needs to make choices for business relevant parameters. Watch what happens when I press that Optimize button:

Suddenly that scary sample size of 1,070,000 has reduced to 142,502 visits to perform my test. The immediate benefit is the impractical multivariate test has become feasible. However, if only a subset of the combinations are being shown, how can the marketer understand what would happen for an untested variant? Simple! SAS Customer Intelligence 360 fits a model using the results of the tested variants and uses them to predict the outcomes for untested combinations. In this way, the marketer can simulate the entire multivariate test and draw reliable conclusions in the process.

So you're telling me we can dream big in the creative process and unleash our superpowers? That's right my friends, you can even preview as many variants of the test's recipe as you desire.

The majority of today’s technologies for digital personalization have generally failed to effectively use predictive analytics to offer customers a contextualized digital experience. Many of today’s offerings are based on simple rules-based recommendations, segmentation and targeting that are usually limited to a single customer touch point. Despite some use of predictive techniques, digital experience delivery platforms are behind in incorporating machine learning to contextualize digital customer experiences.

At the end of the day, connecting the dots between data science and testing, no matter which flavor you select, is a method I advocate. The challenge I pose to every marketing analyst reading this:

Can you tell a good enough data story to inspire the creative minded?

How does a marketer know what to test? was published on Customer Intelligence Blog.

Hyperparameters, digital analytics, and key performance indicators

--Digital Marketing, Auto Tuning, customer intelligence, data science, Digital Analytics, Digital Intelligence, Hyperparameters, marketing analytics, predictive analytics No Responses »

8月 112017

How can you tell if your marketing is working? How can you determine the cost and return of your campaigns? How can you decide what to do next? An effective way to answer these questions is to monitor a set of key performance indicators, or KPIs.

KPIs are the basic statistics that give you a clear idea of how your website (or app) is performing. KPIs vary by predetermined business objectives, and measure progress towards those specific objectives. In the famous words of Avinash Kaushik, KPIs should be:

Uncomplex.
Relevant.
Timely.
Instantly useful.

An example that fits this description, with applicability to profit, nonprofit, and e-commerce business models, would be the almighty conversion rate. In digital analytics this metric is interpreted as the proportion of visitors to a website or app who take action to go beyond a casual content view or site visit, as a result of subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.

{\mathrm {Conversion\ rate}}={\frac {{\mathrm {Number\ of\ Goal\ Achievements}}}{{\mathrm {Visitors}}}}

Although successful conversions can be defined differently based on your use case, it is easy to see why this KPI is uncomplex, relevant, timely, and useful. We can even splinter this metric into two types:

Macro conversion – Someone completes an action that is important to your business (like making you some money).

Micro conversion – An indicator that a visitor is moving towards a macro conversion (like progressing through a multi-step sales funnel to eventually make you some money)

Regardless of the conversion type, I have always found that reporting on this KPI is a popular request for analysts from middle management and executives. However, it isn't difficult to anticipate what is coming next from the most important person in your business world:

"How can we improve our conversion rate going forward?"

You can report, slice, dice, and segment away in your web analytics platform, but needles in haystacks are not easily discovered unless we adapt. I know change can be difficult, but allow me to make the case for machine learning and hyperparameters within the discipline of digital analytics. A trendy subject for some, a scary subject for others, but my intent is to lend a practitioner's viewpoint. Analytical decision trees are an excellent way to begin because of their frequent usage within marketing applications, primarily due to their approachability, and ease of interpretation.

Whether your use case is for supervised segmentation, or propensity scoring, this form of predictive analytics can be labeled as machine learning due to algorithm's approach to analyzing data. Have you ever researched how trees actually learn before arriving to a final result? It's beautiful math. However, it doesn't end there. We are living in a moment where more sophisticated machine learning algorithms have emerged that can comparatively increase predictive accuracy, precision, and most importantly – marketing-centric KPIs, while being just as easy to construct.

Using the same data inputs across different analysis types like Forests, Gradient Boosting, and Neural Networks, analysts can compare model fit statistics to determine which approach will have the most meaningful impact on your organization's objectives. Terms like cumulative lift or misclassification may not mean much to you, but they are the keys to selecting the math that best answers how conversion rate can be improved by transparently disclosing accurate views of variable importance.

So is that it? I can just drag and drop my way through the world of visual analytics to optimize against KPIs. Well, there is a tradeoff to discuss here. For some organizations, simply using a machine learning algorithm enabled by an easy-to-use software interface will help improve conversion rate tactics on a mobile app screen experience as compared to not using an analytic method. But an algorithm cannot be expected to perform well as a one size fits all approach for every type of business problem. It is a reasonable question to ask oneself if opportunity is being left on the table to motivate analysts to refine the math to the use case. Learning to improve how an algorithm arrives at a final result should not be scary because it can get a little technical. It's actually quite the opposite, and I love learning how machine learning can be elegant. This is why I want to talk about hyperparameters!

Anyone who has ever built a predictive model understands the iterative nature of adjusting various property settings of an algorithm in an effort to optimize the analysis results. As we endlessly try to improve the predictive accuracy, the process becomes painfully repetitive and manual. Due to the typical length of time an analyst can spend on this task alone - from hours, days, or longer - the approach defies our ability as humans to practically arrive at an optimized final solution. Sometimes referred to as auto tuning, hyperparameters address this issue by exploring different combinations of algorithm options, training a model for each option in an effort to find the best model. Imagine running 1000s of iterations of a website conversion propensity model across different property threshold ranges in a single execution. As a result, these models can improve significantly across important fit statistics that relate directly to your KPIs.

At the end of running an analysis with hyperparameters, the best recipe will be identified. Just like any other modeling project, the ability to action off of the insight is no different, from traditional model score code to next-best-action recommendations infused into your mobile app's personalization technology. That's genuinely exciting, courtesy of recent innovations in distributed analytical engines with feature-rich building blocks for machine-learning activities.

If the subject of hyperparameters is new to you, I encourage you to watch this short video.

This will be one of the main themes of my presentations at Analytics Experience 2017 in Washington DC. Using digital data collected by SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and analyzing it with SAS Visual Data Mining & Machine Learning on VIYA, I want to share the excitement I am feeling about digital intelligence and predictive personalization. I hope you'll consider joining the SAS family for an awesome agenda between September 18th-20th in our nation's capital.

Hyperparameters, digital analytics, and key performance indicators was published on Customer Intelligence Blog.

6 examples of data management, reporting and analytics in higher education

--Higher Education, Data Management, education, predictive analytics, SAS Visual Analytics, Visual Analytics No Responses »

6月 212017

Today in higher education, savvy users expect to have the information they need to make data-informed decisions at their fingertips. As such, leaders in institutional research (IR) are under pressure to provide these users with accurate data, reports and analyses. IR has been tasked with transforming data and reports in [...]

6 examples of data management, reporting and analytics in higher education was published on SAS Voices by Georgia Mariani

Digital intelligence for optimizing customer engagement

customer engagement, customer intelligence, Customer Intelligence 360, customer journey, data science, Digital Intelligence, marketing analytics, personalization, predictive analytics, Predictive Personalization, Prescriptive Analytics No Responses »

1月 282017

Digital intelligence is a trending term in the space of digital marketing analytics that needs to be demystified. Let's begin by defining what a digital marketing analytics platform is:

Digital marketing analytics platforms are technology applications used by customer intelligence ninjas to understand and improve consumer experiences. Prospecting, acquiring, and holding on to digital-savvy customers depends on understanding their multidevice behavior, and derived insight fuels marketing optimization strategies. These platforms come in different flavors, from stand-alone niche offerings, to comprehensive end-to-end vehicles performing functions from data collection through analysis and visualization.

However, not every platform is built equally from an analytical perspective. According to Brian Hopkins, a Forrester analyst, firms that excel at using data and analytics to optimize their digital businesses will together generate $1.2 trillion per annum in revenue by 2020. And digital intelligence — the practice of continuously optimizing customer experiences with online and offline data, advanced analytics and prescriptive insights — supports every insights-driven business. Digital intelligence is the antidote to the weaknesses of analytically immature platforms, leaving the world of siloed reporting behind and maturing towards actionable, predictive marketing. Here are a couple of items to consider:

Today's device-crazed consumers flirt with brands across a variety of interactions during a customer life cycle. However, most organizations seem to focus on website activity in one bucket, mobile in another, and social in . . . you see where I'm going. Strategic plans often fall short in applying digital intelligence across all channels — including offline interactions like customer support or product development.
Powerful digital intelligence uses timely delivery of prescriptive insights to positively influence customer experiences. This requires integration of data, analytics and the systems that interact with the consumer. Yet many teams manually apply analytics and deliver analysis via endless reports and dashboards that look retroactively at past behavior — begging business leaders to question the true value and potential impact of digital analysis.

As consumer behavioral needs and preferences shifts over time, the proportion of digital to non-digital interactions is growing. With the recent release of Customer Intelligence 360, SAS has carefully considered feedback from our customers (and industry analysts) to create technology that supports a modern digital intelligence strategy in guiding an organization to:

Enrich your first-party customer data with user level data from web and mobile channels. It's time to graduate from aggregating data for reporting purposes to the collection and retention of granular, customer-level data. It is individual-level data that drives advanced segmentation and continuous optimization of customer interactions through personalization, targeting and recommendations.
Keep up with customers through machine learning, data science and advanced analytics. The increasing pace of digital customer interactions requires analytical maturity to optimize marketing and experiences. By enriching first-party customer data with infusions of web and mobile behavior, and more importantly, in the analysis-ready format for sophisticated analytics, 360 Discover invites analysts to use their favorite analytic tool and tear down the limitations of traditional web analytics.
Automate targeting, channel orchestration and personalization. Brands struggle with too few resources to support the manual design and data-driven design of customer experiences. Connecting first-party data that encompasses both offline and online attributes with actionable propensity scores and algorithmically-defined segments through digital channel interactions is the agenda. If that sounds mythical, check out a video example of how SAS brings this to life.

The question now is - are you ready? Learn more here of why we are so excited about enabling digital intelligence for our customers, and how this benefits testing, targeting, and optimization of customer experiences.

tags: Customer Engagement, customer intelligence, Customer Intelligence 360, customer journey, data science, Digital Intelligence, machine learning, marketing analytics, personalization, predictive analytics, Predictive Personalization, Prescriptive Analytics

Digital intelligence for optimizing customer engagement was published on Customer Intelligence.

How do you revive customer loyalty in the digital age?

customer data, customer experience, customer journey, customer loyalty, predictive analytics, Predictive Marketing, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 No Responses »

12月 162016

We've been saying that the customer is queen or king for quite some time now. And in the coming year, that will be truer than ever. The customer determines where he or she finds information and which channel and which supplier gets the sale. And there is an abundance of these suppliers (certainly online). Customer loyalty, it seems, is as good as dead. Yes, of course, we are faithful to our local baker and tailor, but for items we don't buy everyday and where there is no personal relationship with the supplier (nor does there always need to be one), we don't really care where we order from. Right?

Today, many consumers make their choice based on only two criteria: price and reviews – the latter providing some confidence about product quality and supplier reliability. And it's an obvious choice. Why would you pay top price for an OEM device charger that you can get from a Chinese web shop for a fraction of the price – unless you need it tomorrow, of course? Virtually no supplier has a monopoly today, and you can switch to a new supplier with just one mouse click.

So does that leave all companies having to compete solely on price? No, that would create an unhealthy market situation. Aiming for good reviews is a great idea, of course, but is merely a partial solution. To encourage customer loyalty in the long term, you need to focus heavily on the last touch point in the customer journey. The three elements are essential in these efforts: data, analytics and real-time decisioning.

Determining the right data

Customers leave a data trail behind in various channels. This data enables you to build up a wealth of information about the customer. This is nothing new, but I have noticed that a lot of companies have difficulty in determining what data from this data stream they should add to the customer profile. By analysing the data, you can determine whether data can be assigned as a fixed value to the customer, or is of only temporary relevance, such as a location, for example. In addition, you can really get to know your customer by analysing this data, using this knowledge to predict behaviour and responding to this behaviour in real time.

Predicting behaviour

Using analytics to predict customer behaviour is the key to success in the last step of the customer journey. In this way, you can create the ultimate balance between customer service-driven interactions and marketing and sales-driven interactions. Just think how valuable it would be to know at this last touch point whether you should persuade the customer with your service, or use a combination offer with a product from the same line?

Helping customers make decisions in the moment

By using data strategically, you can predict where the customer has a need. You know what motivates him to actually make a purchase at that critical decision point. Responding smartly to this will increase customer satisfaction and make those customers more loyal. As a result, you will see that price and reviews are indeed important, but that customers still need a supplier who knows and recognises them, and responds to their needs.

To learn more about creating fiercely loyal customers, download our free ebook, Keep them coming back: You guide to building customer loyalty with analytics.

tags: customer data, customer experience, customer journey, customer loyalty, predictive analytics, Predictive Marketing, SAS Customer Intelligence 360

How do you revive customer loyalty in the digital age? was published on Customer Intelligence.

Machine learning and what it means for marketing

big data, customer experience, customer intelligence, predictive analytics, recommendation engine, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 No Responses »

9月 012016

Machine learning has a high profile currently and is riding a wave of exposure in the media that includes articles about subjects from self-driving cars and self-landing rockets, to computers beating the world’s best players at Go, the most computationally complex board game in the world. Is there an opportunity for your organisation, and the marketers within it, to make use of this “new” technology?

The buzz

Machine learning techniques were developed as long ago as the 1950s, but with the advent of big data and large analytical engines, the prevalence and the ease of applying the techniques has increased.

Additionally, organisations now understand the value that analytics can bring, so are willing to place it front and center in their plans and invest more time and resources in exploring new and better techniques. Segmentation and predictive models, for instance, have proven themselves time and again in the marketing world, but to a certain extent, they require a higher degree of knowledge to understand. In some cases, a machine learning technique unburdens the user of the statistical work, but provides just as good an answer as a traditional technique. More people, with more data, trying to make more decisions lends itself to a technique that requires less manual intervention.

What it means for marketing

Organizations, large and small, can have huge, complex data that can from the latest advances in machine learning – banks have transaction records, telcos have call details, retailers have purchase records.

Take marketing in our omnichannel world as an example. There are huge amounts of customer interactions and there are business problems, such as attribution and optimizing the customer experience, that are perfect for the latest machine learning techniques. For real-time personalization of experience and real-time calculation of recommendations, great benefit can be gained from self-learning algorithms in reinforcement learning.

But it is important to remember that organizations also have many analytically driven challenges that are smaller, simpler and just as important and valuable to the bottom line of the organization. Again, for marketing, more traditional disciplines like segmentation and propensity modeling are still extremely useful, and organizations need to keep using capabilities like these to ensure the continued benefits from their use.

How SAS can help

SAS has embraced machine learning techniques for many years, and recently took a further step forward with the latest release of our SAS Customer Intelligence 360 suite of products. SAS has built a recommendation engine with the best of both worlds – a predictive model built using traditional techniques (logistic regression) and a machine learning algorithm (using naïve Bayes classifiers). Fortunately, your customers don’t need to understand these techniques – they just want your website to make better recommendations!

tags: big data, customer experience, machine learning, predictive analytics, recommendation engine, SAS Customer Intelligence 360

Machine learning and what it means for marketing was published on Customer Intelligence.

SAS 360 Engage: A/B testing and algorithmic segmentation

--Digital Marketing, A/B Testing, analytics, Campaign Management, customer intelligence, customer journey, data science, Digital Personalization, marketing analytics, predictive analytics, Predictive Marketing, Prescriptive Analytics, SAS 360 Engage, SAS Customer Intelligence 360, segmentation No Responses »

8月 272016

For the uninitiated, SAS 360 Engage enables organizations to interact with consumers by allowing them to create, manage and deliver digital content over web and mobile channels. Wait a minute. SAS does more than the analytics? That is correct. SAS 360 Engage is a marketing super force serving as a one-stop shop for data capture all the way through delivering highly-targeted, personalized digital experiences.

Being able to dynamically place content and offers into digital channels – across devices and points in time – is nothing new for savvy marketing brands focused on optimization. As customer journeys spread across fragmented touch points while customers are demanding seamless and relevant experiences, content-oriented marketers have been forced to reevaluate their strategies for engagement. But the complexity, pace and volume of modern marketing easily overwhelms traditional planning and design approaches that rely on historical conventions, myopic single-channel perspectives and sequential act-and-learn iteration.

Presently, marketers primarily use a variety of content optimization approaches that include A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing, at its simplest, is a method of website or mobile optimization in which the conversion rates of two versions of a page are compared using visitor response rates. By tracking the way visitors interact with the content– the videos they watch, the buttons they click, or whether they sign up for a newsletter – you can infer which version of the content is most effective.

Due to the popularity of this technique, SAS 360 Engage supports A/B/n testing. A/B/n testing is an extension of A/B testing, where “N” refers to the number of versions being tested, anywhere from two versions to the “nth” version. For example, when a brand has more than one idea for what the ideal digital experience should be, A/B/n can be used to compare each hypothesis and produce an optimized decision based on data, not subjectivity.

Testing is attractive because it is efficient, measurable and serves as a machete cutting through the noise and assumptions associated with delivering effective experiences. In parallel, the evolving marketing landscape is driving a greater mandate for testing: to operate in more channels, handle more data and support more users. Testing must mature beyond traditional on-site experimentation to fully optimize a multifaceted customer journey.

The majority of today’s technologies for personalization have generally failed to effectively use data science to offer consumers a contextualized digital experience. Many of today’s offerings are based on simple rules-based segmentation to drive recommendations. Building off the benefits of multi-channel A/B/n testing, this is where SAS 360 Engage injects its analytical muscle to differentiate from other personalization technologies. Let's break this down:

At the conclusion of an A/B/n test, there is usually a winner and one or more losers.
Is there really one superior experience for your entire marketable audience? Is it possible that experiences should vary by segment?

Performing algorithmic segmentation sounds awesome, but who really has the time to do it? We have so many tests to run.

The time has arrived for predictive marketing to have its moment in the sun, and with Forrester recently naming SAS the leader in customer analytics, it's official - the 800-pound gorilla in advanced analytics is locked in on solving complex issues facing the space of data-driven marketing. Making digital personalization more relevant for target audiences is just like preparing a delicious meal; it all comes down to the ingredients and preparation process to rise to the occasion!

A beautiful and interpretable visualization is generated highlighting what is unique about this segment, as compared to everyone else who was exposed to the test. If the brand wants to target this audience in future campaigns, a single click populates this segment in the platform for future journey orchestration.

If you look closely at the image, you will note in the upper half of the report that the winner of the A/B/n test is variant A. However, the lower half of the report showcases a newly discovered segment. It turns out that when a specific customer segment with recent purchase, stay and amenity activity interacts with this hospitality brand, variant B produces better results. How did SAS 360 Engage do this? By applying automated firepower (i.e. algorithmic clustering) to produce this prescriptive and actionable insight. To learn more about this segment, marketers can profile the audience:

SAS 360 Engage was built with the recognition that some marketing teams don't have data scientists available, and have real needs for analytical automation. To improve upon the concept of A/B/n testing, augmenting this capability with automated, algorithmic segmentation with prescriptive results addresses an important need. Let's assume you've run an A/B/n test with four versions of a page, and variant A was crowned the champion. Wouldn't it be nice to know that if a specific segment arrived at your website, an alternative experience would facilitate a better result?

tags: A/B Testing, Campaign Management, customer journey, data science, digital marketing, Digital Personalization, marketing analytics, predictive analytics, Predictive Marketing, Prescriptive Analytics, SAS 360 Engage, SAS Customer Intelligence 360, segmentation

SAS 360 Engage: A/B testing and algorithmic segmentation was published on Customer Intelligence.

Turning your data historian into a futurist

--Oil and Gas, Business, data historian, energy, energy forecasting, predictive analytics No Responses »

7月 142016

Under-utilized technology creates a drag on an organization. The ability to get more out of the tools you already use can increase the value of an existing investment, and that value grows as processes become more efficient and decisions are based on firmer foundations. Consider the facilities engineer at an […]

Turning your data historian into a futurist was published on SAS Voices.

How artificial intelligence will enhance customer experiences

analytics, artificial intelligence, Business, cognitive computing, customer analytics, customer intelligence, deep learning, marketing automation, marketing software, predictive analytics, Predictive Marketing, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 No Responses »

6月 062016

There's no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is here and is rapidly gaining the attention of brands large and small. As I talk to customers and prospects, they are interested in understanding how AI and its subcomponents (cognitive computing, machine learning, or even deep learning) are being woven into various departments (marketing, sales, service and support) at organizations across industries.

Here are some examples of cognitive computing and machine learning today at organizations, and how these capabilities will enhance customer experience in the future.

I think it's important to start with a few foundational facts:

AI as a practice is not new – John McCarthy and others started their research into this area back in the 1950s.
AI and its subcomponents are rooted in predictive analytics (neural networks, data mining, natural language processing, etc., all have their beginnings here).
Automation and the use of supervised and unsupervised algorithms are crucial to machine learning and cognitive computing use cases.
Deep learning uses the concept of teaching and training to accomplish more advanced automation tasks. It’s important to note that deep learning is not as prevalent from a customer experience perspective as machine learning and cognitive computing. Let's take a look at what AI means for brands as the customer experience becomes the primary differentiator for marketing organizations.

A cognitive computing use case

Cognitive computing enables software to engaging in human-like interactions. Cognitive computing uses analytical processes (voice to text, natural language processing and text and sentiment analysis) to determine answers to questions.

For example, a SAS customer uses automation to provide a quicker response to service requests that come in to the brand's contact center. It can send an automated reply to service inquires, direct the customer to appropriate departments, and send customer responses back to the channel – all using SAS solutions. These capabilities reduces the number of replies that require human intervention and improves service response times. This same use case can be applied across industries such as retail, telecom, financial services and utilities. The end result? A happier customer and an improved customer experience.

Analytics: the core of machine learning

Machine learning uses software that can scan data to identify patterns and predict future results with minimal human intervention.

Analytics play an important role. Model retraining, the use of historical data and environmental conditions all serve as inputs into the supervised and unsupervised algorithms that machine learning uses. For example, some of our large telecom and financial services providers use data, customer journey maps and past patterns to be able to serve timely and relevant offers during customer interactions.

Many of our customers can do in less than one second, and are providing response and replies that are relevant and individualized. Another great example of machine learning is the development work that SAS is doing currently with regard to its marketing software.

Our customer intelligence solutions use embedded machine learning processes to make setting up activities and completing tasks in the software easier for analysts and marketers alike. For instance, the software will automatically choose the optimal customer segment and creative combinations for a campaign. It will also recommend the best time to follow up with a customer or segment and on the customer’s preferred devices. Machine learning also gives marketers the ability to understand how to use and modify digital assets for the most reach and optimal conversions.

The newest addition to artificial intelligence

Deep learning, a newer concept that relies on deep neural networks – is certainly something that is coming to the marketing and service realms. Many companies have started looking at how we teach and train software to accomplish complex activities – drive cars, play chess, make art (the list goes on). As for marketing, I believe we will see deep learning being used to run marketing programs, initiate customer service interactions or map customer journeys in detail.

These are just a few examples of how we are seeing AI improve the customer experience. You and I, as digitally empowered consumers, will certainly benefit from man and machine working together to automate the interactions that we have with brands on a daily basis. I urge you to keep an eye out for how brands big and small are automating the interactions they have with you – I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the outcome.

tags: artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, customer analytics, deep learning, marketing automation, marketing software, predictive analytics, Predictive Marketing, SAS Customer Intelligence 360

How artificial intelligence will enhance customer experiences was published on Customer Intelligence.