This story caught my eye because it’s about consumers gathering data about companies, instead of the other way around. Man bites dog, as it were. In this case, consumers are sharing grocery store price and availability information through a new company called Basket. One of the co-founders was an early employee at Waze, which is based on crowd-sourcing traffic information.
Agile development methods may reduce the chances of deploying a central customer database, according to a survey just released by the CDP Institute. But companies that combined agile methods with long term plans had more databases than companies that used either method by itself. Read the blog, download the report, and form your own opinions.
Speaking of acquisitions, GE Digital recently spent $915 million to buy cloud-based field service technology company ServiceMax, $153 million for Internet of Things data integration specialist Bit Stew, and an undisclosed amount for machine learning expert Wise.io. This is all intended to build its equipment monitoring business but if you don’t think equipment data can be transformed into customer insights, you might want to think again.
Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.