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E-GUIDE

BEYOND CLOUD...THE AGE OFTHE CUSTOMERHow the convergence of key tech trends is changing business forever

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It was almost a year ago that Londonloves Business.com published its Cloud For Business e-guide. At that stage, most managers still

weren’t exactly sure what cloud was, nor why it was being touted as so significant. It was still mainly the IT departments of organisations urging management to consider shifting to cloud technology, though FDs and CEOs were beginning to latch on.

Now, cloud has become common parlance in boardrooms across the country, regardless of industry. Managers have realised the huge benefits cloud offers, from creating new efficiencies, to safeguarding the business network, to realising true competitive advantage. It is hard to come across a senior executive in any discipline who doesn’t now grasp how important technology is in propelling business forwards.

The appetite for technology is now coming from a range of different business disciplines. Early last year, Gartner forecasted that by 2017 an organisation’s chief marketing officer will be spending more on IT than its chief information officer.

That seems highly plausible. Technology is no longer the glue that sticks together email and business networks to get employees through the working day. It is the engine of innovation. And, because customers are adopting new technologies at an unprecedented pace, technology is increasingly at the heart of all customer relationships.

Brits have embraced technology with relish. Six in 10 mobile phone owners in the UK have smartphones, according to Ofcom figures from December 2012. Brits spend more online than any highly-developed economy in the world, according to the same data set. A recent Nokia study found the average Brit checks their smartphone around 150 times a day.

All of which makes Gartner’s prediction completely logical: if consumers are making digital such an entrenched and constant part of their lives, then marketers are going to have to get to grips with technology and learn how to forge meaningful relationships with customers through digital media.

Looking at the customer experience only through the prism of marketing is, though, slightly reductive. Because driving the most exciting customer engagement advances is an understanding that business technologies must now operate across all disciplines and all silos of an organisation, holistically. And to glean the most detailed customer insights and offer the most sophisticated customer experiences, cloud-based technologies and digital channels should operate as one ecosystem and fully integrate. This is what digital convergence is all about. The technologies at its heart offer immensely powerful insights into customer behaviour

“Do you want to understand your customer better than your rivals?” says Sophie Hobson, editor

INTRODUCTION

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This e-guide is brought to you by LondonlovesBusiness.com, in association with IBM.

LondonlovesBusiness.com is the new digital newspaper for established entrepreneurs and executives of London’s mid-market companies. We aim to further the ambitions of London’s businesses, celebrate good business and success, and bring you frank debate about the issues facing London businesses. We are fast becoming the must-read website for London’s business community through our mix of the latest business news across all sectors, profiles of London’s greatest entrepreneurs, features exploring the trends you can capitalise on, and the best of London lifestyle.

LondonlovesBusiness.com is published by Casis Media LtdCasis Media Ltd 56 Buckingham Gate London SW1E 6AE

Editor: Sophie Hobson sophie.hobson@londonlovesbusiness.com

Business development director: Jenny Knighting jenny.knighting@londonlovesbusiness.com 0203 394 1847

CONTENTS04Foreword By Doug Clark, IBM UK & Ireland Cloud Leader

06What is digital convergence and why does it matter?

08The key technology trendsAnd how they are changing the way business is done

14Winning in a converging worldHow these new technologies are coming together to revolutionise customer experience and engagement

17What now? Find out more...

that will change the way businesses interact with their customers forever.

So do you want to understand your customer far better than your competitors? Do you want to have truly meaningful conversations that forge deep loyalty? Do you want to predict behaviour patterns to save costs while boosting sales? Then it’s time to understand the connection between convergence, cloud, and, most critically, the new age of the customer.

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Cloud has revolutionised the way our organisations operate. It has driven incredible new efficiencies, made collaboration easier

and been the platform for new business innovation.

Now we are seeing cloud and cloud-based technologies redefine the relationship between business and customers. At IBM, we have this idea about a role: the Chief Executive Customer. We believe business should be completely centred around what your customer wants, and we are dedicated to creating technology that helps you achieve that focus.

Of course, the customer has always been at the heart of good businesses. But it hasn’t always been easy to get to know your customer. Just a few years ago, if you

wanted customer feedback, you’d have to ask. Now you can pick up on a customer’s feelings without them having to exert one calorie in telling you. You can listen to their conversations on social media. You can analyse their interactions with your website, across various devices. You can understand how often they like to buy, what sales channels are best suited to them, and how they like to communicate with your business.

All of this gives you the information you need to personalise each individual customer’s interactions with your business and ensure you are always being as relevant as possible. By tailoring your offer to them at every junction – which our technology allows – you foster loyalty, generate greater interest and ultimately increase transaction rates.

This is crucial for businesses that want to survive and thrive today and tomorrow. Customers are now able to broadcast their feelings about your business to the world with the click of a button. It is vital that you have a deep understanding of what they like and dislike, so you can move immediately to adapt products and services, gain market advantage, and develop genuinely wanted new products and services. Customer service is more important than ever in the digital age.

We have worked hard to ensure that the technology we create lets you constantly learn from and adapt to what your customer really wants. We can even help you predict what they want before they know themselves.

Your customer is your new boss. Now it’s time to do things the way they want.

Follow me on Twitter:@IBMcloud@cloudstuff

“By tailoring your offer at every junction, you foster loyalty and ultimately increase transaction rates,” says Doug Clark, IBM UK & Ireland Cloud Leader

FOREWORD

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Brits have become increasingly tech-savvy in recent years, and the huge leap in consumer technology has meant people now expect to be able to interact with a business on whatever channels suit them best at any given moment. They might ask a business a question about a product on Twitter, then buy through the company’s website, then pick it up in-store. Or they might, say, order a taxi over the phone,

then expect a text to let them know it is five minutes away.

Customers certainly aren’t thinking about “digital convergence” at any stage of these commerce cycles. But business are thinking about it – at least, those businesses that understand how convergence allows them to understand their customers like never before; to tailor customer experiences and customer services to unprecedented levels of quality.

WHAT IS DIGITAL CONVERGENCE AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

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marketing resource is best allocated to convert them to a sale; or through which digital channel they are most likely to ultimately make a purchase; what the total

cost per acquisition is for them across all your channels, and therefore how valuable they are to your business; all the while building a very detailed profile of who they are, what and how they like to buy from you, and the most effective way

to communicate with them. You could then give them an entirely personalised customer experience that gives them only what they really want.

By looking at group customer behaviour across all those different digital interactions, you would be able to identify which marketing channels are most effective for which products; understand immediately how well a new product or service has been received through social media sentiment analysis, and so refine or develop your offerings immediately; predict what orders you should be placing ahead of the curve by instantly identifying patterns in purchasing behaviour; and so on.

This might all sound fantastically futuristic – too good to be true, even. But, as it happens, the technology to achieve all this is already available to us.

The trouble at the moment for most businesses is that their various digital and physical channels operate independently from one another. Even where digital interactions are being monitored and data

So what exactly is digital convergence?To understand that, it’s important to

first think about how a customer interacts with your business digitally. Think of your business’ digital presence – you probably have social media channels, a website and a mobile website, at the very least. Then there are the other forms of digital interaction you have with them, whether or not they are visible to the customer – email, your CRM system, your payment systems, maybe SMS and newsletter campaigns, and so on.

Digital convergence is the shift towards unifying these technologies, so you can glean unprecedented insights from them and better manage the customer experience. By housing these various technologies on the cloud, the most sophisticated technology on the market allows you to understand how a customer behaves across all channels. You can pull out more granular customer profiles and more accurate behaviour patterns than anyone would have thought possible even a couple of years ago.

How? Every single digital interaction your customer has with your business, through any channel, is a potential data point. Imagine if you could capture all these data points then synthesise them and analyse them to reveal customer behaviour trends. You might be able to understand, for example, what form of digital communication an individual customer is most responsive too, and therefore where

“Digital convergence allows you to glean

unprecedented customer insights and better manage

the customer experience.”

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collected carefully, insights into customer behaviour are fragmented.

You might know, for example, that 10% of your Twitter followers reacted positively to your new product launch by using Twitter sentiment analysis tools, or through reporting from your social media bods. And you might know that you sold £10,000 of that product in your first fortnight. You might also know that your website saw a 3% uplift in traffic over that same period, with 34% coming from mobile devices. But are you able to join the dots between those different insights, to see how many of the social media advocates of the product then converted to sales, and whether they bought from you via your website or offline?

The aim of today’s smartest business analytics technology is to give you those insights, by picking up those manifold data points across all those different digital interactions, then analysing that huge amount of data to draw out meaningful patterns and insights. That means you can far better understand how your customers are behaving, and, even better, what is going to be most useful to them in the future.

This is what the convergence of the technologies in this e-guide – mobile, social, analytics and cloud – is all about. It is about pulling together insights that were previously fragmented and getting technologies that didn’t talk to each other to interact and inform one another. Convergence aligns the data from different cloud-based services, then uses analytics to identify patterns and trends and improvements you could make

across the board.The best technology also facilitates

far better conversations with customers. Once you can see where a customer is most responsive to your communications and digital interactions, and understanding their buying habits, you can make your marketing

to them completely bespoke. That means you only communicate with them in the way that best suits them, bringing them the most relevant offerings – saving them hassle and annoyance, and saving you unnecessary expenditure.

What all this points to is a shift in what business technology is trying to achieve. Cloud (and the technologies it acts as a platform for) are no longer just useful for making your back-end IT system more efficient – you hopefully will have taken care of that already. Instead, the new wave of business technology is completely customer-orientated. Viewed through the prism of what’s best for any gives business’ customer, the leading software and technology providers are creating solutions that enable you to understand and serve your customers better than ever before.

So let’s meet our key technologies and find out why they matter so much independently, then how they can be brought together to help you win in the newly converging world that is the age of the customer.

“The smartest analytics technology lets you understand

what is going to be most useful to your customers in the future.”

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THE KEY TECHNOLOGY TRENDS And how they are changing the way business is done

Technology is accelerating at such a pace that customers are coming to expect excellence in every interaction with businesses – though they increasingly see that excellence simply as the norm. Few would realise how fiendishly complicated it is to make superlative digital customer relationships look simple. Are you still stopped in your tracks with wonder, for example, when an online retailer displays product recommendations (bespoke for you) when you’re on their website?

The technologies that underpin services like this are fantastically intelligent, but for customers, they are simply part of modern living. That means there is more pressure than ever before to give customers the most personal, enjoyable and easy experience of interacting with them through digital media.

Businesses risk falling behind if they can’t grasp the importance of the technologies that are ushering in far superior customer relationships.

Those that will gain competitive advantage, meanwhile, will be the businesses who fully appreciate how much value the right technologies can add to their customer relationship: how

these technologies work, what they are capable of, and what they can do for both businesses and their customers.

If you want to keep pace with your customers’ expectations and, perhaps even more importantly, get ahead of your competitors, you need to understand how dramatically technology is revolutionising customer experience and engagement. This chapter will explain the key technologies at the heart of that revolution.

CLOUDCloud computing has radically improved business technology. (As a reminder, cloud is the technology that lets you access digital services, apps and data from any digital device, anywhere, as they are stored remotely from that device – iCloud, Flickr and email are all good examples of cloud in action. If you haven’t quite got your head around cloud and all its incredible benefits, our e-guide on cloud for business explains all.)

The cloud landscape is evolving fast,

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$35.6bnvalue of the global cloud

computing services market by the end of 2013

Visiongain

delivering ever-better value and services and enabling businesses to find new efficiencies and smarter models. It’s no surprise, then, that its popularity seems to be exploding. In April, Visiongain forecasted that the global cloud computing services market would be worth $35.6bn by the end of 2013.

Cloud sits behind the other three technologies cited in this chapter. It acts as a platform for them, enabling them to be pulled together to work in unity. It’s worth noting that cloud is the means of delivery that is facilitating the latest advancements, rather than a new trend in itself.

Up until recently, the agility, security and affordability that cloud offers were being deployed by businesses mainly to improve operations that weren’t really visible to the customer: to streamline IT systems, management processes, supply chains and distribution networks; to enable businesses to scale up and down according to the needs of fast-changing workforces; to enable collaboration between employees, partners and suppliers; to improve business network security and safeguard data; to facilitate more sophisticated remote working opportunities; and to unearth new back-end operational efficiencies using analytics.

And cloud is still enabling all those benefits for businesses. But as well as that, it is now being used as a powerful, game-changing platform that brings together the other technologies detailed in this chapter.

These technologies are entirely centred around customers, and their advantages are completely visible to them. The major

advancements in social, mobile and analytics technology that you will read about in this e-guide are possible because they all operate on the cloud. Cloud’s flexibility, economic advantages,

instantaneousness and data-crunching capabilities are being used in ever-more exciting ways to improve the customer experience. The next chapter will explain more about this.

FURTHER READING…

› Cloud infographic: The forward thinker’s guide to Cloud

› Our e-guide on cloud for businessFind other useful links at the end of this guide

SOCIAL BUSINESS Facebook is now the world’s third largest population. Twitter has more than half a billion customers. According to the government’s Office For National Statistics, half of all adults in the UK use social media sites – rising to 87% among 16 to 24-year-olds. We are living in the social age.

The significance of social media for businesses is hard to overstate. It has fundamentally changed the dynamic of the customer relationship, and is revolutionising marketing. Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity.com and chairman of Kayak.com, summed it up at IBM’s 2012 CMO+CIO Leadership Exchange when he said: “It used

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to be so simple: marketing drove people to the door, sales closed the deal, and IT added it up. That was it. Marketing was a one-way street. Then along came the web and it really changed all of that. Marketing is now a two-way street, because customers are engaged and involved, and they’re talking back.”

That “talking back” is key, because it means that for the first time in history, businesses can really understand what their customers love and loathe about their business – not what they say they like in surveys and on customer service helplines, but what they tell their friends and colleagues about a business in casual conversation. Social media makes every single person who interacts with your business either a promoter or an assassin of our brand. If they don’t like what you’re doing, they can – and will - broadcast it to the world. Of course, if they have a positive experience of your business through social, they become a marketer for your business. The significance of brand reputation on social shouldn’t be underestimated. PricewaterhouseCooper’s 2012 Global Multichannel Consumer Survey found that six in 10 online shoppers use social media to “follow, discover, and give feedback on brands and retailers”.

It is easy to get overwhelmed by quite how much conversation there is out there on the web. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in October 2012 that 500 million tweets are sent each day – that’s more than 347,000 every minute. And that’s just one social media channel. How do you distil the sprawling morass of chatter across the multitude of social media channels out there – particularly

when significant new social media sites seem to spring up every couple of months? And how can you then use the insights and data

gained from social to drive decision-making?

Human data capturing just won’t cut it when there is so much data out there, so the right social business analytics tools are key. The best

technology allows you to capture opinion, identify trends and patterns, then use predictive analysis to unearth opportunity according to where those trends are headed.

Social business analytics, such as IBM’s Social Business technology, for example, can help you in the following key areas to improve your customer understanding and engagement:

› Marketing: gain insight into individual customers so you can create tailored marketing campaigns for them and have authentic conversations with them

› Sales: insights into customer profiles show you customers’ preferred communication style and where the greatest profit opportunities lie

› Product development: use the constant stream of customer feedback on social media to inform tweaks and improvements to products and services. By analysing wider conversations across social, you can understand what the hot topics are and what subjects are growing in importance for your customer base – and so identify growth markets

› Customer service: you know by now that social lets you respond immediately to concerns and complaints. But it gets much

347,000number of tweets sent

every minute Twitter CEO Dick Costolo

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better than that – social business analytics uses sentiment analysis to model and predict emerging problems – meaning you can foresee problems and avoid them, super-charging customer loyalty

Social isn’t just about listening to customers. It’s about having meaningful conversations with them – and, beyond that, anticipating when they want to talk, so you can create new business opportunities. With the right analytical tools to make sense of the enormous amount of data that social creates, you can get unprecedented insights into customer behaviour. Today’s technologies allow you to make sense of all that unstructured data to gain overviews of what customers think, and to act on that. They also let you track sentiment to help you fire-fight, and to capitalise on positive sentiment on social.

The next chapter will explain how social business comes together with analytics and cloud products to make sure you are always listening to and acting on what customers are saying about your brand, whether directly or indirectly.

Taken a level further, the right social business technology can in fact help you avoid negativity on social media. Advanced social business set-ups let customers “self-service” digitally, connecting them with one another and more directly with the organisation so they can resolve problems more quickly, rather than turning to social media to complain. Look to phone company giffgaff by way of example: it is mainly run by its customers, who connect with each other and constantly provide feedback and ideas to the business on how it can be improved. This gives customer both a valuable sense of ownership, and far less reason to moan publicly.

The government is adopting a similar approach. By encouraging people to manage improvements to their local area and services through digital, it has engaged citizens and made them part of the process. The customer feedback and interaction in both these instances clearly gives both organisations the huge additional benefits of saving costs and improving their offerings more quickly.

FURTHER READING…

› Social business: http://www.ibm.com/social-business/us/en/solutions/social-analytics.html

› More on the business of social business: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership/ibv-social-business.html

MOBILEThe explosion of smartphones in the UK and beyond is staggering. A 2012 Cisco report found that mobile data traffic in 2011 was 12 times the size of the entire internet globally in 2000. The government’s Office for National Statistics reported in February 2013 that one in three UK adults accessed the internet using their mobile phone every day in 2012. And it’s not just smartphones: tablets and other mobile devices are becoming evermore prevalent. Analysts have estimated that between around 40 to 50 million tablets were shipped worldwide in the first three months of 2013 alone. Meanwhile, PC shipments fell.

The mobile device is increasingly at the centre of consumers’ digital life. Mobile

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device users increasingly access endless reams of their personal and business lives through their phone, from family photos stored in the cloud to shared sales spreadsheets that can be collaborated on remotely through cloud packages for business. A smartphone or other mobile device has the potential to be the gateway for all of an individual’s digital data, applications and services.

Among all the other things they are now capable of, it’s particularly relevant for businesses that mobile devices are now also shops – and mobile retail, also known as m-commerce (i.e. enabling customers to buy through their phones) is exploding. In June 2013, Gartner forecasted that $235bn will be transacted by mobile phone globally in 2013, up some 44% from 2012. Smartphones are becoming wallets, payment cards and bank accounts too. They let you tap to pay, transfer money by text, and host digital wallets.

What do all these mind-boggling advances mean for businesses? Mobile devices are data. A consumer’s interaction with a mobile provides a fantastically rich wealth of data points. Understanding how a customer interacts digitally with your business via their mobile device tells you how they like to buy and what they want to buy. The next chapter will explain more about how you can garner and harness these insights.

A phone is, of course, also a communication device – and it provides the perfect conduit for you to communicate with your customer throughout the

purchasing process, and to entice them into a transaction, or simply foster a stronger relationship. The next chapter will also explain how you can capitalise on the ever-present mobile phone

to better serve your customer.The key for businesses is that mobile

devices are just that: mobile. You can deepen relationships with your customers through mobile by giving them exactly what they want, wherever and whenever they want it.

FURTHER READING…

› http://www.ibm.com/mobilefirst/us/en/Read the ‘What next?’ section at the end of this e-guide to find out more.

ANALYTICS David Cappucio, an analyst at Gartner, recently made an address that gives us some idea of the amount of digital data out there today. In the last 60 seconds, he pointed out, there were 204 million emails sent, two million Google searches, 20 million photo views on Flickr, 100,000 tweets sent and 277,000 Facebook logins.

There is a staggering amount of digital data being created in everyday life. Even just for your business, every digital interaction a customer has with you on all channels generates a potentially useful data point, as previously described. That amount

$235bntransacted by mobile phone

globally in 2013, up 44% from 2012

Gartner

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of data can be completely overwhelming – how do you even begin to know what to filter out, what’s useful, and, most importantly, how to draw meaningful patterns from it?

That’s where business analytics comes in. Analytics has evolved into something really quite magnificent in recent years. Originally, businesses used analytics to better understand their own internal processes, find efficiencies and drive down costs. For example, they might identify duplications in their print marketing – sending more than one brochure to the same household, for example – and use the information to streamline back-office processes, saving costs.

But analytics is now being used to increase customer loyalty, cross- and up-sell, improves conversion rates and increase the frequency of sales. How? Data and insights from all channels, from all points of digital interaction with customers, are brought together and analysed holistically, rather than analysing each silo or function of a business individually. By housing your various digital services on the cloud, analytics technology can pool data and draw out deeply meaningful insights about customers’ behaviour on an individual and group level.

These insights help you understand how to better serve your customer, and how to gain competitive advantage by staying one step ahead of what they want – this is known as predictive analytics. An IBM whitepaper identifies the following five best-practice ways that customer value can

be maximised using predictive analytics: base your customer strategy on predictive profiles; predict the best way to win the right customers; predict the best way to grow customer relationships; predict the best way to keep the right customers longer; use predictive intelligence at every customer touch-point.

The difference analytics can make to your bottom line is quite astonishing. An IBM Institute for Business Value study cites IBM research that

found organisations can increase customer retention by up to 9% for each increase in analytic maturity, and move 4% of their sales orders to more cost-effective channels. It’s little surprise, then, that an MIT Sloan and IBM Institute of Business Value study found that “organisations that excel in analytics often outperform those who are just beginning to adopt analytics by a factor of three to one. And top performers are 5.4 times more likely to use an analytic approach over intuition and gut instinct when making decisions.”

In the age of the customer, understanding your customer better than your competitors is what gives you true advantage.

FURTHER READING…

› IBM Institute for Business Value’s Customer Analytics Pay Off whitepaper

› Whitepaper: Five predictive imperatives for maximising customer value

› IBM Smarter AnalyticsIf you have a few minutes, take this big data survey: www.ibm.com/2013bigdatasurvey

Analytics can create

9%potential increase in customer retention

4%of sales orders

move to more cost-effective channels

IBM

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Customers are becoming increasingly multi-channel in the way they interact with businesses – and vice versa. The lines between B2B and B2C are blurring, as all of us change the way we expect to interact at work and socially. A potential customer might, for example, notice a brand via a Facebook Like, and quickly browse the brand’s website. There the customer sees the brand’s Twitter feed, and decides to follow it. Weeks later they see a tweet about a promotion while scanning Twitter on their phone, and click through to view the product. Instead of buying there and then, they email the link to themselves and make the purchase a few days later from their office computer, requesting to pick up the item from the store nearest their home. They get a text telling them when the product is ready for pick-up, then a follow-up email a fortnight later to ask for feedback on it, including a 10% discount off their next purchase. Delighted with the service, the customer tweets about it, and gets a response from the brand within the hour.

Now, keeping track of all that and being able to trace the route the customer takes across your different channels – not to mention trying to figure out which channel provided the greatest ROI in terms of the final sale – could, understandably, seem like something of a nightmare. It actually isn’t at all, if you have the right technology – but we’ll come to that shortly.

Firstly, let’s focus on the great news: although multi-channel shoppers might seem more difficult to track, it is widely estimated that they spend 30-50% more than single-channel customers. Research from

Deloitte has put the figure as high as 80% more per transaction. That means a straightforward and sophisticated way of managing multi-channel customers is more necessary than ever if you want to realise bottom line growth.

Even if someone chose to flagrantly ignore the financial sense in facilitating a smarter multi-channel way of engaging customers, they are likely to fall significantly behind competitors if they don’t keep pace

WINNING IN A CONVERGING WORLDHow the these new technologies are coming together to revolutionise customer experience and engagement

“It’s widely estimated that multi-channel shoppers spend 30-

50% more than single-channel customers.”

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with customer habits. Customers are coming to expect a smooth, seamless journey across different channels. The customer in the above example is becoming typical. In the age of the customer, businesses must be able to accommodate all the different ways that customers may choose to interact through at any given moment, on any given device and through any given channel.

To go beyond that and exceed customer expectations, businesses have to be exceptional at all points of digital interaction. They must shift from addressing the wider market to forging personalised relationships, understanding and communicating with individual customers. When the customer is at the heart of everything, businesses must make sure they are always providing exactly what the customer wants, when they want it, through the medium that best suits them.

For example, an airline could send you a message in real-time on your mobile when

your aircraft has to change gates. Or your bank might text you when you walk past a branch asking if you would like your balance displayed, or tweet you to let you know they have a free appointment slot if you fancy a chat. In these examples, analytics, social and mobile are all working in unison, underpinned by the cloud. And you can imagine how useful services like this exceed expectations.

To really win loyalty, then, your customer must be at the heart of your full commerce cycle, from buying to marketing to selling to servicing. The beauty of the new wave of converged technology is that it brings together all the insights from each segment of the commerce cycle, viewing the cycle holistically.

With the customer at the centre of the commerce cycle, converged technology can identify new opportunities for growth and greater efficiency while servicing the customer better.

SMARTER COMMERCE ›IBM’s Smarter Commerce approach, for example, facilitates all this by drawing together different cloud-based technologies, making sense of various channels and data sets, and giving incredibly deep insights into customer behaviour. Among other things, Smarter Commerce helps you determine what customers are doing and saying; manage interactions with them across all channel; determine the best response; and engage them with targeted, personalised interactions. It streamlines different channels, pulling together insights into and processes for social media marketing, cross-channel campaign management, customer awareness and analytics, brand experience, marketing resource management and digital marketing optimisation. Not bad, eh?

IBM reports that businesses using this truly cross-channel approach have seen up to 300% productivity and campaign volume growth, 10-20% increase in response rates and 20-40% lower campaign and marketing costs.Smarter Commerce applied to selling processes has seen businesses realise 60-70% annual growth, with an 85% conversion rate when a customer uses more than one channel. This is offered through the ability to, for example, let customers pay online and pick up in-store, reduce B2B sales costs by automating manual processes, and offer better delivery options to exceed customers’ expectations.

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WHAT NOW? FIND OUT MORE…

Turn information into insightsOrganisations are overwhelmed with data. On a smarter planet, the most successful organisations can turn this data into valuable insights about customers, operations, even pricing. With advanced analytics, you can open new opportunities for business optimisation by enabling rapid, informed and confident decisions and actions.

› Read more about Smarter Analytics

›

Connect and empower peopleInnovation comes from collaboration. And collaboration comes from everywhere. Firms that embrace the power of social technologies will unleash the productivity and innovation throughout the entire value chain — from employees to partners to suppliers to customers.

› Read more about Social Business.

The cloud removes restraintsSmarter comes at a cost: hardware, programs, people to run them. Cloud computing offers multiple ways to reduce that cost through efficient use of resources. Utilising the cloud means not having to power idle equipment and being able to rethink and redistribute software quickly and easily. It also means a nimbler, more efficient organisation.

› Read more about Cloud Computing

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Business moves to mobilityEven as storefronts had to adapt to the Internet, commerce is adapting to mobility. Armed with smartphones and tablets, consumers want to use those devices to browse, shop and pay. Today’s leaders recognise that desire and are building mobile enterprises in response.

› Read more about Mobile Enterprise

WANT TO TALK MORE? › Tweet us: @londonlovesbiz@cloudstuff@vickygillies@LauraColvine

And join in the conversation using #techforbiz If you are interested in attending an event to discuss these converging trends, please send your contact details to vickygillies@uk.ibm.com

LET’S BUILD A SMARTER PLANET.

How to compete in the era of ‘smart’.

workers who amass knowledge to having workers who impart it.

Cemex, a $15 billion cement maker, created its first global brand by building a social network. Workers collaborating in 50 countries helped the brand launch in a third of the anticipated time.

From you as a ‘segment’ to you as you.

In the age of mass media, marketers served broad population ‘segments’.

But the age of Big Data and analytics is revealing customers as individuals. And smarter enterprises deliver useful services to one individual at a time.

Finding success on a Smarter Planet.

An organisation invested in Big Data and analytics, social, mobile, and the cloud is a smarter enterprise. On a Smarter Planet, the next challenge is culture: changing entrenched work practices to make the most of these advances. To learn more, visit us at ibm.com/smarterplanet/uk

For five years, IBMers have helped cities and companies build a Smarter Planet. Leaders have begun using Big Data and analytics to transform their enterprises with mobile technology, social business and the cloud.

Big Data has changed how enterprises and institutions serve their customers, and their ability to harness it helps them compete in today’s era of ‘smart’.

Using analytics, not instinct.

Executives long relied on intuition to formulate strategy and assess risk. Such thinking is rendered obsolete by Big Data.

Today, when each individual is connected with millions of others, the cost of a bad call can be devastating. Analytics helps leaders see beyond their own biases to find real patterns and anticipate events.

The social network goes to work.

The rise of social and mobile technology is shifting the competitive edge from having

Police in Memphis used Big Data and analytics

to verify patterns of criminal activity, which

helped them change their strategy.

Social networks shift the value in the workplace

from knowledge that people possess to knowledge that

they can communicate.

Effective marketing no longer aims publicity at broad demographic groups— it opens conversations with individuals.

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