CDP Institute

Speaking of self-service data prep, Birst just announced that the latest generation of its business intelligence system, Birst 6, will allow “everyday business users” to “connect, prepare and relate data entirely on their own and regardless of skill.”

Let’s imagine that just maybe you have better ways to spend your time than data prep.

I found this Accenture report hard to follow but the message is still important: superior customer experience is now more important than product innovation. Key quote: “Two thirds (66 percent) of companies surveyed reported that their most successful innovations in the last two years have been derived from improved customer experiences and related new business models versus new products alone.”

Commerce Signals has announced a service that lets advertisers, agencies, and publishers measure in-store sales associated with their campaigns in near real time. Advertisers provide anonymized exposure data, which is matched against purchase data from Visa Advertising Solutions without exposing personally identifiable information. Commerce Signals acts as an intermediary. The point is to measure advertising effectiveness outside of digital channels, which is still where most spending takes place, and to get results quickly enough to fine-tune campaigns while they’re under way.

Digital marketing agency Stirista has introduced StiristaLINK, a service to enrich B2B and B2C profiles with business, consumer, and social data including contact information. B2B profiles are linked to consumer information using proprietary geo-coding methodology. Just in case you didn’t have enough data sources to consider.

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.

MapR, which combines distributed processing, event streaming, real-time analytics, and enterprise scalability in a “converged data platform”, has released combined software and services solution called Customer 360 Quick Start. The offering packages MapR’s big data and machine intelligence technology with staff for a five week project that assembles data and solves a specific marketing problem such as upsell or cross sell, segmentation, call center analytics, or content recommendations.

I’ve long doubted that serious data privacy regulation will happen in the U.S. It seems that some pretty big businesses agree: according to this story, Verizon is merrily planning to combine online and offline data on its subscribers to allow ad targeting on par with Google and Facebook. If there were much chance for a backlash against data collection, this would be bad news for companies building their own customer databases. But chances are slim.

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.

I’d love to have made “the customer strikes back” into a theme for the day, but those stories are hard to find.

Let’s look at empowerment from a different angle.