Customer Data

Technology is giving companies an unprecedented view of their customers: demographic data; buying preferences; behaviors that signal the intent to buy; and analyses that enable them to develop expectations about how customers are likely to act during the buyer-seller relationship. Those abilities ar...

Zuora two weeks ago announced its first acquisition, Frontleaf, and a new product, Z-Insights. This marks an important moment for both Zuora and what it has called the "subscription economy." The subscription economy has spawned a culture in which people have been conditioned to expect subscription-...

Salesforce on Thursday launched Wave for Big Data, a tool that will help marketers and salespeople leverage customer data in the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. Google, Cloudera, Hortonworks, New Relic, Informatica and Trifacta have signed on to the Salesforce Analytics Cloud Partner ecosystem. Powered ...

Bill Clinton won the presidency with the mantra, "It's the economy, stupid," and I think CRM could borrow heavily from that pithy bit of logic. If you can check your preconceptions at the door and actually perceive the information in front of you, there's no telling what you can figure out. Such is ...

Customers are changing the rules of business. They are well informed and well connected, and they have high expectations. Whether making a purchase, booking a restaurant, or searching for information, they demand intelligent digital interactions.

You can tell when the economy is doing well, because instead of worrying about how you're going to make the next mortgage payment, you worry about the next disruption in business. The big worry on the horizon now is the digital disruption, a nice piece of alliteration designed to make you question y...

In an earlier chapter in my career, I had the seemingly lofty title of "software and intelligence editor" at a telecommunications industry trade magazine. Even back in 1996, telecom was experiencing a "big data" problem. It wasn't a problem of collection -- no, telephone companies collect more data ...

Oracle did some smart things at last week's Oracle Modern CX Conference and user meeting in Las Vegas. The company has been making strides in organizing its messaging and products around customer experience in the wake of its RightNow Technologies acquisition a few years ago. It's been taking on the...

Transaction systems have all the fun but systems of record do all of the work; at least it seems that way. Maybe you've never thought of it this way but unless both kinds of systems are working well -- and working together -- your results will suffer. Record systems can tell you what happened, but b...

You might remember Garry Kasparov, the last chess grand master to beat a computer. That was about 20 years ago when he went up against Deep Blue, the IBM megaframe that is the direct ancestor of Jeopardy-winning Watson. A rematch between Deep Blue and Kasparov a year later did not go so well for the...

Users of Verizon Wireless' network and products will find it will be easier to opt out of the carrier's tracking activities. Verizon Wireless, similar to other carriers such as AT&T, has been using a "supercookie" identifier to follow smartphone users' mobile Web activity. This data is then pack...

Credit card users may be dismayed by findings MIT Researchers reported last week in the journal Science: Just a few pieces of vague non-identifying information, namely the dates and locations of four purchases, were enough to identify 90 percent of people in a data set of 1.1 million credit card use...

Part of my new year routine has been ordering new business cards. In this electronic age, they are the only things I actually print, and I'm a writer! Well, actually, in a few weeks I'll publish a book, Solve for the Customer, in paperback, and the two are related. I made a discovery while writing t...

No, this is not an article about fracking -- drilling for gas and oil in shale. This is about "drilling down" into big data. We've been using the term for a long time and it provides a useful metaphor for data analysis. However, we've conditioned ourselves to think of drilling down only to a superfi...

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds and business and finance columnist for The New Yorker, published an article in the magazine's Nov. 10, 2014, issue entitled, "Better All The Time." The piece connects the importance of culture-wide continuous incremental improvement using data and ana...