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Whether your company is an established enterprise that's beginning to embrace e-business or a dotcom pioneer, chances are it needs a whole new marketing and technology strategy.
Your strategy must keep your company in front of customers in innovative and cost-effective ways. It must respond to each customer's interests and needs！regardless of the means that the customer chooses for contact. And it can't be done without a lot of help from the CIO.
Staying competitive entails much more than website-enabling your organization's marketing efforts. It involves strategically massing key technology forces！including the Web！into a new marketing infrastructure that manages the ways your organization acquires, develops and retains all of its customers, all of the time. The future of your business depends on it.
Why? Because the nature of customer interactions is undergoing a transformation so profound that the way business is conducted will never be the same.
It's About Delivering What Customers Want
For virtually every kind of business, marketing is changed forever, thanks to two dovetailing events.
Widespread use of the Internet has changed how customers expect marketing to work. Because customers now enjoy almost instant fulfillment of online requests for information, products and services, they've driven marketing into real-time. That means old, linear ways of creating and responding to demand！building it, forecasting it, scheduling bulk production and shipment from suppliers, and so on！are no longer cost-efficient or competitive. Companies must now become responsive to the explicit and implicit needs of their prospects and customers.
Previously, businesses pushed marketing and sales information toward customers. Now companies must allow customers to pull the marketing information they want, when they want！and close the sale on their terms. All this means is that in order to be successful, companies must change how they interact with their customers, and thus how they conduct marketing activities.
Technology breakthroughs offer new ways to create and meet customer demand. The rise of the Internet, both as a new marketing medium and a ubiquitous communications mechanism, has thrust the marketing function into the center of business. As a new marketing medium, the Internet and its associated marketing technologies have made it possible to cost-effectively communicate with smaller and smaller segments of customers. In fact, it's now technically and economically possible to create marketing dialogues with individual customers and prospects！and to measure the ROI of such dialogues. As a communications mechanism, Internet technologies act as a "connective tissue" within companies, linking historically disparate marketing, sales and service functions. De facto standards, such as HTML, TCP/IP, XML, ever decreasing network costs and the ubiquitous browser user interface, have simplified the work needed to connect sales, marketing, operational systems and data.
These days, companies need to move products, services and information faster, as real-time demand requires. This shifts the organization's focus away from production processes and toward customer processes. Now, companies' ability to thrive depends on capturing appropriate customer data from every point of customer contact, from order entry to fulfillment！including website clickstreams, e-mail, telephone, fax, call centers, kiosks/stores, resellers and direct sales forces.
That customer data must be morphed into valuable information about each customer's role, interests, needs, and ability and willingness to buy. This enables companies to individualize their responses to
each customer during each customer interaction！regardless of which customer touchpoint is used. When marketing innovation is successful, every interaction with a customer or a potential customer becomes a direct or indirect sales opportunity. This begins to erase conventional distinctions among sales, service and marketing.
Few organizations have constructed the marketing technology infrastructure necessary for this new kind of marketing, but it's clear that for just about all businesses the competitive future depends on an immediate commitment to marketing innovation. A commitment that leverages the opportunities proffered by the changing dynamics of technology and customer demand. To move slowly or not at all is to forfeit the future to more nimble rivals.
Enter IT
Successful marketing innovation in customer interaction cannot be accomplished without the direct involvement of！and changes to！an enterprise's information technology infrastructure.
Virtually all of the functions that were once exclusively within the purview of sales and marketing are now influenced by technology considerations. Permission-based e-marketing, campaign management software, and analytical, predictive and individualization tools shape how customer prospecting is done. And customer contact and cross-selling efforts have been transformed by channel extranets, sales-force automation systems, point-of-sale data collection, data mining applications, data warehouses, data marts, and analytical, predictive and personalization tools.
In many enterprises, these various technology initiatives！and others dealing with call center, fulfillment, logistics and billing operations！serve an assortment of customer touchpoints without coherence. Some are legacy operational systems still essential to the enterprise that must be reconceived and rebuilt without shutting down the business. Others are isolated departmental applications optimized for a single channel or touchpoint. Applications like these must be modified for a distributed data architecture in which the right customer, product or interaction data is made available to the right touchpoint. Still others！too many of them websites！were constructed beyond the supervision of IT by operational staff oblivious to the architectural principles on which robust applications rely. These too must be upgraded to meet IT's quality, performance, scalability and maintainability standards.
What's required, then, is a technology infrastructure that's designed for the deep customer communications support on which marketers depend. This is best delivered with a new customer-centric, marketing infrastructure in which customer touchpoints, customer-interaction business logic and customer and content data are separated, yet interconnected. Creating such a customer-centric marketing infrastructure typically requires development of an overall, marketing-aware technology strategy comprised of three stages:
1 - Develop a customer-centric database strategy
An effective customer-centric database strategy requires that data from multiple customer touchpoints be gathered over extended periods of time. If done well, the ultimate result is the creation of a customer-interaction database！which contains not only data about the customer (name, address, company) but also data about how the customer transacts and works with the enterprise (clickstream, role in purchase, preferred purchase channel).
Dealing with multiple sources of customer data. As the primary focus of the enterprise moves toward the customer, legacy databases organized around products, services, geographies, transactions and channels must be redesigned to support a unified view of past and present customer interactions.
Executing against a customer-centric database strategy is a difficult task. For example, customer databases are often populated with data extracted from legacy systems. The process of extracting and maintaining this legacy data can be expensive and often includes:
Legacy data archeology (finding the right data).
Legacy data transformation and cleansing (since few enterprises adhere to data standards, extracted data often must be reworked so that it's usable by the customer-interaction database).
Building the data models and metadata repositories to support the necessary analysis of this legacy data.
Customer names and addresses are typically lengthy, and companies often maintain name and address variations. When these are combined with customer demographics and interaction histories, database storage requirements can become gargantuan. Upload size grows！leading to longer upload times, thus reducing the time the systems are available for business users.
Finally, designing customer-centric databases takes substantial business as well as technology planning. What real business value will the database deliver? Answering that question will help scope the effort and avoid problems. For example, to keep a customer-interaction database manageable, data can be partitioned to exploit parallel database technology and parallel processing techniques. However, partitioning data by geographic region when business needs dictate a partition by customer income level can trigger database system hot spots that hinder performance.
Integrating the clickstream. A successful customer-centric database must also capture and use clickstream data. Clickstreams, which record every mouse click or keystroke of every website visitor, offer companies a chance to develop detailed records of customer interaction.
In addition to purchase transactions, clickstreams include information about products and pricing viewed, questions asked, alternatives compared, last action before leaving and much more. Capturing, storing, analyzing and mining clickstream data and integrating it with customer data from other sources can help companies complete the unified view of customers and prospects that they crave.
Even B2B companies with a relatively small customer base can benefit from capturing and analyzing clickstream data because of the detailed knowledge they can derive about each customer's and prospect's preferences. This kind of detail enables marketing to evolve beyond shallow-and-broad promotional efforts and target appropriate information and offers at specific customers and prospects. For example, a large equipment manufacturer may initiate a live online sales dialogue once a website visitor spends more than 15 minutes reading product specs on certain high-end equipment. This helps enhance the value offered to each customer and prospect while also improving return-on-marketing investment.
Currently, most clickstream data analysis is operationally oriented！analyzing traffic and usage patterns to figure out better ways to meet customer and prospect response-time objectives. The challenge is how to derive from large amounts of detailed clickstream data the kind of business knowledge needed to strategically approach a customer or prospect. This kind of knowledge！which helps build long-term relationships with constituents！comes from mining large quantities of customer data.
Some suggest that companies do not need to keep every clickstream bit and byte, as long as the data is properly analyzed up front in a multistep process that includes these steps:
First, define how marketing wants to use the clickstream. This may mean starting with a small, relatively simple clickstream analytics project and learning from it before building out a larger clickstream analytics system.
Next, collect, parse and transform the clickstream data and discard some of the less meaningful information. Then summarize what remains and store this in a database for a period of time. The yield: a summarized clickstream that can be further aggregated！or cubed！using online analytic processing (OLAP) techniques.
Finally, process full clickstream detail (using parallel processing techniques to cope with the volume in reasonable amounts of time). Then join it with other customer data to build individual customer and prospect profiles that can be stored in a database where they're available for analysis. The clickstream data itself is not always retained, just the by-customer analysis.
Others say it's important to capture and retain full clickstream data for an extended period, integrating it with data about customers, products, websites, site performance and so on in order to create business insight. After all, it can take months or even a year for customer relationships to achieve profitability and exhibit signs of continuity. As such relationships evolve, an enterprise can mine the data associated with good customer relationships to determine how to replicate the phenomenon with other customers！something that cannot be done without an extended clickstream history integrated with other data sources into a customer-interaction database.
Managing "content." Your database plans need to include not only data about your customers and prospects, but also for your customers and prospects. Product spec sheets, customer service information, order status and special offers are all content that need to be managed and then presented at the right time. Further, content databases must be developed in a manner that makes it easy to change the content and keep it up to date.
2 - Boost customer data analytics capabilities
To understand and anticipate the behaviors of customers, analytic functionality has become essential for corporate survival and is often the power behind today's marketing campaign software.
These business intelligence tools rely on mathematical algorithms and programmed business rules to compare data and answer evaluation queries. Marketers can use these tools to derive information from streams of customer-interaction data and then feed it back to websites and other touchpoint systems, automatically modifying the way these touchpoints interact with customers and prospects. Examples of personalized customer interactions at different touchpoints developed with marketing analytic tools and customer-interaction data include:
Proactive, individualized webpages incorporating predictive models to drive real-time recommendations. On a company website, such pages can help guide customers through purchase choices, boosting sales results and promoting customer loyalty.
Call center sales agent screens, updated with offers and information appropriate for the customer on the phone. These help increase customer satisfaction and sales.
In a B2B environment, recognizing the customer's role (such as purchaser, influencer, user) at the time of interaction, via online or offline touchpoints. This allows just the right information to be presented to accelerate a sale or retain the customer.
Web and e-mail promotions that can be automatically delivered by certain triggering events, like opt-in agreements, trade show attendance or predefined rules concerning customer responses in other interactions.
Event management for seminar and trade show registration including follow-up material distribution and survey processing.
To be effective, today's analytic engines need to support the following business analyses:
Which customers generate the greatest sales revenues and profits?
What are their buying habits！where, when and how do they buy?
What are likely to be the most effective ways to target customers for future product or service sales?
Which products or services are likely to create cross-sell or up-sell opportunities?
How effective are website content and traffic patterns in meeting sales and service goals?
What is the ROI for a particular marketing campaign?
Today's real-time, up-to-the-moment marketing often requires that legacy analytic capabilities be transformed from batch paper reports into business rules that are intelligently cached in system memory to drive real-time recommendations at any interactive customer touchpoint. It also means that marketing program concepts about the customer！such as market segment, channel of distribution, customer role in the purchase process！need to be embedded into, or overlaid onto, existing systems. And closed-loop measurement systems must be constructed to allow rapid refinement of marketing campaigns. This often requires new levels of integration between systems and data that have not been previously linked.
3 - Excel at customer-interaction technologies through multiple channels
The technologies and applications used for interacting with customers yield competitive advantage and extremely high value.
But to be effective, these technologies and applications must be integrated so that a company can first create a single view of its customers across all channels and touchpoints and then coordinate multi-channel marketing messages with precision and speed.
Integrating applications and marketing processes. The requirements for targeting messages to customers across multiple channels affect marketing infrastructure. The communication between applications takes the form of data and process, which both require careful integration and coordination. For example, a marketer will often initiate a marketing promotion simultaneously through multiple channels (such as the call center, website and outbound e-mail). The customer, however, may choose to respond to this marketing promotion through a channel other than the one they used to receive the offer. Supporting this type of multi-channel interaction, and allowing ROI to be measured, requires integrated marketing processes and systems.
An increasing role for Web servers. Consider, for instance, Web servers. Just a few years ago, Web servers offered little more than "brochureware" and got little, if any, attention from IT. But as customers have moved to the center of corporate business strategy, Web servers have become mission-critical, the new locus of corporate IT.
So Web servers and other connected servers！such as database, directory and e-mail servers！need to be redesigned, monitored and maintained for high availability, fault tolerance and response capability. That means understanding the interdependencies among these services. It also means understanding the enterprise's Web content and its dependencies on various services. For instance, confirmation messages that get e-mailed to website visitors may depend on e-mail services. Or a Web storefront's catalog may rely on a database server to display current items and inventory.
Traffic between the customer-interaction database and Web servers, as well as other operational databases, will affect an enterprise's network infrastructure！especially as real-time or near-real-time information gets delivered to customers, customer service agents, salespeople and supply chain partners. Organizations with large customer-interaction databases that support real-time individualization will likely want to locate Web servers and databases near each other to enhance response time.
It's 10 p.m.！do you know where your network is? To make sure you do, it's critical to ask and answer some key questions: Does your network have sufficient bandwidth now and for the future！especially during peak load periods? Can you manage the data and processes needed to integrate distributed customer touchpoints? Is access to marketing data and systems easily available for marketing professionals? Are you prepared for wireless interaction with customers? What about security? Will your database architecture scale to meet increasing customer demand?
Answering these questions often leads to the realization that current networks and Web servers are inadequate and new kinds of higher-powered Web hosting alternatives are necessary.
For many organizations, the architectural demands of creating an infrastructure supporting such marketing innovation are too great for the turnaround that today's fast-paced business climate demands.
Constructing a customer-focused marketing technology infrastructure that can evolve with the marketplace requires high uptime, standard platforms and interoperability. Also, without well-designed systems that implement open standards and can be easily integrated with other software and platforms, management and maintenance costs quickly spiral out of control. This kind of architectural approach to the technical aspects of marketing innovation is simply beyond the capabilities of most marketing people.
Thus as the enterprise becomes customer-centric and engages in marketing innovation, IT grows in strategic importance.
Shortages of IT resources. In many organizations, the bulk of current IT resources！as much as 80 percent by some measures！are by necessity devoted to maintaining still-essential legacy and operational systems. This, combined with the predicted shortage of technical staff (IDG estimates that by 2002, technical positions will outnumber available staff by 500,000), makes it difficult to attract the skilled technical people needed for competitive innovation. Some skills！such as domain-specific data mining expertise; developing a Web-based infrastructure based on three-tier use of relational databases, high-level languages and integration frameworks like XML and Java, emerging fiber/hosting/WAP network platforms; and in-memory logic and data staging to support real-time sales and marketing！are best amortized across many organizations.
Fortunately, professional services companies of many stripes and types！including systems integrators, application service providers (ASPs), managed service providers (MSPs) and the like！can be counted on to help design and build the marketing infrastructure elements an enterprise needs to stay competitive. Even if you opt to eventually move all marketing technology and applications development in-house, professional services and applications management companies can help you get started and develop momentum.
Rethinking Help from Outsiders
Professional services companies and applications management companies, working closely with the leading suppliers of marketing systems, can
Brian Carty, Wheelhouse CEO, and Frank Ingari, Wheelhouse founder and chairman, lead Wheelhouse in providing its clients with marketing innovation through the strategic application of technology.often help you and your marketing department quickly launch a full range of innovative, cost-effective and measurable marketing activities. Because of marketing-technology-domain-specific expertise, these companies can often help you move more quickly than you can working on your own.
Staying Focused on Core Competencies
Turning to outsiders to help develop a marketing technology infrastructure doesn't mean you have to cede control or forfeit your strategic edge.
Even the largest organizations have come to understand the value of identifying and focusing on core competencies and then outsourcing other activities to domain specialists. What's more, the right professional services and applications management companies have developed practices and techniques to ensure that you comanage and cocreate the marketing infrastructures that are critical to competitive success, thanks to:
Marketing technology infrastructure development and design customized to your organization's needs.
Established procedures that enable you to monitor performance and results.
Staging capabilities that ensure all infrastructure elements are working before they're installed for production and handed off to your IT staff.
Training that keeps your IT staff and marketing staff on the leading edge.
What to Look for in a Marketing Infrastructure Services Company
Start by finding a professional services company that fields teams comprising both technical and marketing experts. These professionals should work closely with each client to understand where it is today and where it wants to be in the future. Then this understanding should be used to develop appropriate strategies, marketing techniques and technology implementations to achieve the client's goals.
Also look for a company that has the right mix of skills and experience to meet your specific needs, such as:
Real-world experience in developing and managing marketing programs, including consultants who have worked in line marketing roles, have delivered integrated online and offline marketing programs, and have done this in a variety of industries.
Marketing technology architecture planning and design capabilities, including defining business and functional requirements, knowledge and hands-on experience with a wide variety of Web-based CRM, database, content and analytic products, and large distributed customer database design skills.
Marketing technology implementation, including experience with deployment of marketing programs and systems, evaluation of early results and provisions for knowledge transfer to the client's staff.
Customer and marketing analytics skills, which means consultants who understand how marketers measure program success, when and how to refine marketing programs, how different analytic tools can be used to better understand customers, and how to apply modeling techniques to create better, more profitable customer interactions.
Marketing systems staging capabilities, either at the client's site or the professional services provider's staging facility. The company should have a deep knowledge of systems, databases, Web servers, networks, monitoring tools and performance measurement techniques.
Applications management services that handle remote management, monitoring and measurement of client marketing systems and programs.
Wheelhouse can help you create and manage the marketing infrastructure on which your customer interactions must be based thanks to extensive and ongoing investment in the right skills, tools and technologies.
Wheelhouse Service Offerings
These high-end services are the fusion of marketing and technology expertise. Wheelhouse works closely with its clients to understand their marketing objectives and challenges, and envision how they can more effectively build and manage customer relationships. Then clients are given recommendations for the right set of marketing strategies, techniques and technologies to support their objectives. Wheelhouse consultants bring real-world marketing and technology expertise to client engagements, and leverage the company's Applications Management Center (AMC) to deliver implementation and management services. This is a professional services company with a strong belief in knowledge transfer, and training and empowering clients to enable them to carry their marketing initiatives forward.
Wheelhouse helps its clients meet their business and marketing objectives by offering three main categories of services:
Marketing and technology strategy services
Technology and data implementation services
Applications and customer interaction management services
Marketing and Technology Strategy Services
Wheelhouse helps its clients develop strategic roadmaps designed to rapidly achieve marketing goals and architect the technologies they will need to support them. Services include:
Multichannel customer interaction strategy: recommending ways to build and maximize unified customer relationships across online and offline marketing, sales, partner and support channels.
Web properties strategy: auditing the current state of the client's websites, including content, functionality and data capture capabilities; designing a roadmap for multisite integration and optimization of the Web as a core marketing channel.
Program design and ROI analysis: designing customer acquisition, retention and development marketing programs to support the client's strategic objectives; establishing marketing program ROI measurements.
Technology architecture: designing the data and applications architecture required to support marketing activities.
Marketing tool recommendations: selecting the right mix of marketing, analytic and CRM tools to enable and maximize the effectiveness of marketing activities.
Technology and Data Implementation Services
Wheelhouse implements the technologies its clients need to plan, execute and measure their marketing activities！for today and as they grow. Their consultants are trained and experienced in the implementation of leading marketing applications, such as E.piphany, MarketSoft, MicroStrategy and Vignette. Wheelhouse will also help integrate the right data to create a unified customer view across all marketing related channels. Their database-integration consultants are experienced with a wide variety of database tools such as ERStudio, ERwin, Informatica, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle8i, SAS, Syncsort and Trillium.
Marketing application implementations: implementing and deploying marketing applications such as E.piphany, MicroStrategy and Vignette, including performance and quality testing, as well as knowledge transfer about the system to clients.
Fast-track industry installs: providing for rapid implementations of marketing systems with pre-built data schemas, measures, reports and webpages designed for specific industries such as financial services and retail.
Component additions: enhancing the value of existing marketing applications through the addition of new components and modules; integrating marketing applications with broader CRM systems.
Marketing application upgrades: performing upgrades to the latest version of leading marketing applications to enhance performance and functionality, without risk to live systems.
Marketing application pilots: implementing a marketing application, then executing and measuring marketing programs at the AMC; providing ROI analysis on program results.
Database development and integration: integrating multiple data sources to support multichannel marketing; adding new data sources as needed.
System staging (optional): staging any implementation at the Wheelhouse AMC to accelerate deployment and avoid risk to live systems.
Applications and Customer-Interaction Management Services
Through its Applications Management Center, Wheelhouse helps its clients manage and optimize its marketing systems and customer-interaction programs. These retainer-based remote management services enable Wheelhouse's clients to realize true return on investment as they attract, retain and develop their customers. These services include:
Marketing programs optimization and management: planning, executing and measuring advanced marketing programs, including ROI analysis.
Analytic services: providing in-depth reporting and analysis, including customer profiling, segmentation, data mining and decision-tree modeling.
System optimization: improving back-end utilization and performance of marketing applications including Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) and database tuning.
24/7 applications management: remotely managing marketing system performance and stability, including preventive monitoring to ensure systems are running as expected and supporting planned marketing activities.
Industry Experience and Focus
Wheelhouse applies specialized industry expertise and best practices to meet its clients' needs more effectively. Wheelhouse consultants bring decades of marketing and technology experience in several key verticals:
Financial services
Media
High-tech
Retail
Telecom
Wheelhouse's Applications Management Center
Wheelhouse's AMC is a fiber-linked marketing technology development, staging and management center designed to accelerate marketing innovation. It incorporates:
A state-of-the-art data center
A sophisticated network operations center (NOC)
Unix and NT staging development servers
High-speed networks
Highly secure environments
Marketing and technology experts
Proven processes and techniques
In partnership with facilities-based hosting companies like UUNET and Exodus, Wheelhouse's AMC helps organizations in need of marketing innovation develop, test, deploy and manage marketing technologies and applications, ensuring that they're ready for production before transitioning them to their own site or chosen hosting facility. Once staging is complete, Wheelhouse can then remotely manage and monitor client marketing systems and programs on a 24/7 basis.
Wheelhouse AMC-Enabled System Staging
Wheelhouse's AMC eliminates development constraints！such as buying hardware, negotiating software licenses and database integration！by providing a platform to begin building a solution. This enables concurrent development without affecting an organization's existing business-critical systems.
Further, by removing the constraints imposed by internal resources, both human and technological, Wheelhouse can significantly speed time-to-deployment of vital marketing applications without tying up its clients' expensive and scarce IT resources. Capabilities include:
Creation of hardware and software staging platform
Staging of customer and content databases using a combination of databases and database tools
Performance testing using industry standard performance tools
Deployment of client systems to the client's hosting facility
24/7 Applications Management
Through its AMC, Wheelhouse can provide organizations with the infrastructure, security, people and processes to guarantee availability of mission-critical marketing technologies and applications. Wheelhouse reaches beyond just the base infrastructure and focuses on the actual purpose of the infrastructure！marketing applications.
Wheelhouse's 24/7 AMC staff constantly monitors and manages the client's live marketing systems, no matter where they're located. Wheelhouse can also provide the resources and experience to enhance and extend the client's utilization of marketing systems to capitalize on their full capabilities via management and monitoring of:
System and network operation and performance
Marketing applications
Customer and content databases
Customer-interaction policies
Enhancement and extension of e-marketing application utilization
Business today runs on Internet time. Marketing opportunities appear and disappear at Internet speed. For many organizations, the time it takes to plan and implement the technology infrastructure needed to support the pursuit of those marketing opportunities is simply too long, and those opportunities are lost forever.
The alternative is to employ the expertise of an established, proven marketing infrastructure professional services company that understands the technical demands of marketing in Internet time, at Internet speed.
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