Ideal Customer Experience

Our Contributor Fifth Gear developed this infographic to help businesses with their order fulfillment process to ensure a great customer experience. It's as easy as making sure the right customer gets the right products at the right time. It may seem obvious but shipping mistakes happen all the time and you can potentially lose customers because of it. Give your customers the option of getting status updates so they can track where their package is. Also, look at their buying history to see if you can include a free sample in their package or a discount on a complimentary product. Following these tips will give your customers a great experience and help with your customer loyalty.

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The Visual Side of Customer Service {Infographic}

The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Accordingly, 90 percent of all information that comes to the brain is visual.

On the web, it’s estimated that 55 percent of all traffic will be video by 2016, and mobile video traffic will increase by 1800 percent. YouTube, Instagram and Vine are currently the best platforms to maximise video engagement. However, I recently discovered an interesting video engagement enablement that engages your audience by making your online videos easier to browse, view, share and track at http://www.vinjavideo.com/… something I experimenting by myself these days.

Further, I would add that its important to view all these customer service or engagement channels in an holistic view rather than in isolation. I understand that few channels are important than others, however not having an updated content on one could lead to poor engagement. Therefore, no matter how many channel you would like to add into your marketing armory, you need to ensure that you have adequate resource to ensure an ongoing commitment and update to each channel. If you can’t maintain it then don’t start it. 

Courtesy Gryffin, this below infographic provides an interesting insight into the “Visual” element(s) of customer service.

E-Commerce Emergence in APAC

Let me starts with a big picture – Few days ago Flipkart (India #1 online e-commerce site) announced a $1 billion fundraising and incidentally Amazon announced additional $2 billion investment into its India expansion which suggests something brewing in the India market with a growth potential similar to China, where consumers spent almost $300 billion online last year and India where consumers are widely accepting the entire ecommerce way of life. Further, the two emerging markets both have massive populations of over one billion, buoyed by a rising middle class, rapid GDP growth and challenging infrastructure. India's internet retailing sector grew 20 percent last year by value, according to Euromonitor International. Not only that the new wave of online ecommerce companies are targeting shoes, mobile, tickets, but it has also started to revolutionize the education sector in India with India’s leading e-commerce companies such as Flipkart.com, Snapdeal.com and Groupon.co.in are offering online courses and coaching materials, and are even facilitating long duration certificate or business education degrees. Even an interesting concept like Aaramshop that allows your trusted neighborhood retailers to serve their community consumers through their customized web/mobile fronts - https://www.aaramshop.com/.

Now, let me also give you an interesting figure of smart phone sales and internet penetration in APAC.  The reason of sharing the below is to suggest the potential of all these consumer who are foraying into the world of smartphone, which will allow of a percentage of it to move into exploring the world of internet and subsequently buying things online. And I am not talking years here…The tectonic shift is happening at a much faster pace. This not only suggests that consumer are embracing “onlinility or being online” but equally transacting online.   One estimate suggests that Asia-Pacific consumers will account for more than 45% of digital buyers this year and it will expected to grow by 23%.  The mentioned figures certainly endorse my argument that rise of smartphone penetration will also contribute to this retail shift. What’s more, by lowering barriers to entry and removing the need for a physical presence in remote or underdeveloped areas, online retailing will give the traditional retailers the opportunity to expand more rapidly, especially in tier 2 or 3 cities; which historically has been challenging to serve. A recent such example of Xiaomi Mobile Launch in India through flipkart and they claim that the nearly 70% of their first batch order came from tier 2/3 cities which has never been the case in mobile history of India.

  On global perspective eMarketer projections suggest that B2C e-commerce sales will grow by more than 20 percent this year to reach US$1.5 trillion, and surpass US$2.3 trillion by 2017. Forrester Research projections indicate this growth will be partly driven by five of the largest online retail markets in the Asia-Pacific region – China, Japan, South Korea, India, and Australia – which will see e-commerce sales rise from US$398 billion in 2013 to US$858 billion in 2018 at a compound annual growth rate of more than 16 percent. The below chart articulates the share growth potential which is expected in APAC.

Now even if I take the consumer expenditure and disposable income OR age demographics into consideration (as below) , it’s all suggesting one growth direction – up north

Being an Indian and have worked in APAC for man years, I certainly believe in the immense potential that the APAC market has to offer.

With all the above data I am just trying to allude to one fact that I got multiple endorsements in my recent APAC trip when I met many retails and merchants who wants an easy and relative cheap solution to sell their good(s) to a wider audience including serving tier 2 or 3 markets by jumping on the e-commerce bandwagon but don’t know where to buy the ticket or get started with. This forced me to pen this post. I would certainly encourage e-commerce vendors to look it into the opportunity that market has to offer. While, I have more proof points, however I will hold on to that for a later post.

The Evolution of Marketing Data [Infographic]

Being a marketer, I am always a big fan of personalization of communication. Actually, its far easier than what most marketers think. The basic fundamental ingredient to this is how you manage your data and databases at the backend. Subsequently, its imperative for marketers to understand the touch points and the activities history/log of your consumers. If you can bring these ingredients then successful campaigns can only be a by product of that.

The below is an interesting info-graphics that shows an interesting evolution to personalization of communication. Though, I have to say, with all the tools and segmentation available, if marketers are still sticking to the 1960 then please don’t expect results of today. For being successful, you need to match the consumer to the channel to the message…and ensure you move from dissemination to conversation….. 

Data Driven Marketing

This info graphic based on a recent survey conduct with almost 1000 digital marketer and analysts by folks at Econsultancy provides a great insight into the importance of data in the entire whelm of marketing paradigm. This while advocates the fact that in any organization which is serious about marketing in this data age needs to elevate up on how they use or rather utilize their data to make the marketing decision. Further, the importance of data and its ability to understand and further base marketing decision and/or investment dollar base on deeper data analysis is not only good to have rather a fundamental element in today marketing world. The more you invest in understanding the data the better conversion yield you will get out of it.

And yes organizations need to invest in building these resources as its apparent by this graphic that alludes to skill shortages in areas like digital analytics tool, statistical modeling and conversion rate optimization.

Roundup Of Analytics, Big Data & Business Intelligence Forecasts And Market Estimates, 2014

From manufacturers looking to gain greater insights into streamlining production, reducing time-to-market and increasing product quality to financial services firms seeking to upsell clients, analytics is now essential for any business looking to stay competitive.  Marketing is going through its own transformation, away from traditional tactics to analytics- and data-driven strategies that deliver measurable results.

Analytics and the insights they deliver are changing competitive dynamics daily by delivering greater acuity and focus.  The high level of interest and hype surrounding analytics, Big Data and business intelligence (BI) is leading to a proliferation of market projections and forecasts, each providing a different perspective of these markets.

Presented below is a roundup of recent forecasts and market estimates:

• The Advanced and Predictive Analytics (APA) software market is projected from grow from $2.2B in 2013 to $3.4B in 2018, attaining a 9.9% CAGR in the forecast period.  The top 3 vendors in 2013 based on worldwide revenue were SAS ($768.3M, 35.4% market share), IBM ($370.3M, 17.1% market share) and Microsoft ($64.9M, 3% market share).  IDC commented that simplified APA tools that provide less flexibility than standalone statistical models tools yet have more intuitive graphical user interfaces and easier-to-use features are fueling business analysts’ adoption.  Source: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=249054

• A.T. Kearney forecasts global spending on Big Data hardware, software and services will grow at a CAGR of 30% through 2018, reaching a total market size of $114B. The average business expects to spend $8M on big data-related initiatives this year. Source: Beyond Big: The Analytically Powered Organization.

• Cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) is projected to grow from $.75B in 2013 to $2.94B in 2018, attaining a CAGR of 31%. Redwood Capital’s recent Sector Report on Business Intelligence  (free, no opt in) provides a thorough analysis of the current and future direction of BI.  Redwood Capital segments the BI market into traditional, mobile, cloud and social business intelligence.   The following two charts from the Sector Report on Business Intelligence  illustrate how Redwood Capital sees the progression of the BI market through 2018.

• Enterprises getting the most value out of analytics and BI have leaders that concentrate more on collaboration, instilling confidence in their teams, and creating an active analytics community, while laggards focus on technology alone.  A.T. Kearney and Carnegie Mellon University recently surveyed 430 companies around the world, representing a wide range of geographies and industries, for the inaugural Leadership Excellence in Analytic Practices (LEAP) study.  You can find the study here.  The following is a graphic from the study comparing the characteristics of leaders and laggards’ strategies for building a culture of analytics excellence.

• The worldwide market for Big Data related hardware, software and professional services is projected to reach $30B in 2014.  Signals and System Telecom forecasts the market will attain a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17% over the next 6 years.  Signals and Systems Telecom’s report forecasts Big Data will be a $76B market by 2020.  Source: http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/s2t239/the_big_data

• Big Data is projected to be a $28.5B market in 2014, growing to $50.1B in 2015 according to Wikkbon. Their report, Big Data Vendor Revenue and Market Forecast 2013-2017 is outstanding in its accuracy and depth of analysis.  The following is a graphic from the study, illustrating Wikibon’s Big Data market forecast broken down by market component through 2017.

• SAP, IBM, SAS, Microsoft, Oracle, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, and Actuate are market leaders in BI according to Forrester’s latest Wave analysis of BI platforms. Their report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2013 (free PDF, no opt in, courtesy of SAS) provides a thorough analysis of 11 different BI software providers using the research firm’s 72-criteria evaluation methodology.

• Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR Technologies, Pivotal Software, and Teradata are Big Data Hadoop market leaders according to Forrester’s latest Wave analysis of Hadoop Solutions. Their report, The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2014 (free PDF, no opt in, courtesy of MapR Technologies) provides a thorough analysis of nine different Big Data Hadoop software providers using the research firm’s 32-criteria evaluation methodology.

• IDC forecasts the server market for high performance data analysis (HPDA) will grow at a 23.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) reaching $2.7B by 2018. In the same series of studies IDC forecasts the related storage market will expand to $1.6B also in 2018. HPDA is the term IDC created to describe the formative market for big data workloads using HPC. Source: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24938714

• Global Big Data technology and services revenue will grow from $14.26B in 2014 to $23.76B in 2016, attaining a compound annual growth rate of 18.55%. These figures and a complete market analysis are available in IDC’s Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012 – 2016 Forecast.  You can download the full report here (free, no opt-in): Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012 – 2016 Forecast.

• Big Data technology and services will grow from $1.95B in 2013 to $9.83B in 2020, attaining a CAGR of 26%. These and other market forecasts and projections are in a report Huawei sponsored titled Big Data & Advanced Analytics in Telecom: A Multi-Billion-Dollar Revenue Opportunity.  A chart from the study is shown below that shows Big Data analytics market size by business category.

• Financial Services firms are projected to spend $6.4B in Big Data-related hardware, software and services in 2015, growing at a CAGR of 22% through 2020. Software and internet-related companies are projected to spend $2.8B in 2015, growing at a CAGR of 26% through 2020.  These and other market forecasts and projections can be found in Bain & Company’s Insights Analysis, Big Data: The Organizational Challenge.  An infographic of their research results are shown below.

• The World Economic Forum, INSEAD and Cornell University published The Global Information Technology Report 2014 Rewards and Risks of Big Data (369 pp., free, no opt-in), providing a thorough global analysis of technology trends.  This book provides a thorough overview of the Networked Readiness Index and in-depth analysis by national ICT adoption levels.  One of the more valuable sections is on Big Data adoption, with a summarized analysis presented below. You can download the entire book in PDF form here.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Cell Phones and Marketing.

Marketers need to be causes of the new or somewhat an old reality in many countries. This stats is important to remember not only for reaching new audiences but also to ensure you engage adequately with your existing or captive audience. The below is certainly an indicator of a paradigm shift and this will only explode in the coming year through increased smartphone penetration with global population and reaching newer age brackets on the age spectrum.

We all can certainly debate on the below numbers but we can’t do much on the message its giving - Get onto the mobile for every aspect of your marketing.