DataIQNOW 14 had some great speakers, fantastic venue and food wasn’t too bad either… an account of the day by Infoshare’s Richard Onslow.
I was uplifted to hear that businesses are finally paying attention to the most fundamental key to success – the relationship with their customers.
Paul Laughlin keynote on the Banks journey from Past, Present to Future – that data driven consumer understanding had great influence on how businesses responded to their needs, and that businesses realised the reward of distinguishing themselves through intelligent customer relationships. In some cases, the best next action being to do nothing if not enough was known about the customer. In today’s competitive environment it’s understood that consumers have many choices to meet their needs, and aggressive marketing not based on insight is often detrimental.
I was very interested in David Reed’s presentation “The big data life of a consumer” – great explanation of exhaust, social, open & event data, the volume & velocity of which is increasing exponentially. Unless you tie Big data findings back to structured data it is not actionable. Customer interact with organisations is now replicated across internal systems, social media and multiple channels. The challenge is, of course, how to maintain, manage, and link these critically important relationships with customer activity into an actionable data asset to drive insights and better customer interactions.
Other highlights were Rachel Hall’s excellent presentation on the pitfalls of not including the business early on in the technology decision, and the risks of allowing IT to buy tools in isolation. Mike de Halpert’s message on keeping analytics simple and Charles Wells from Just Giving who again focused on gaining actionable insights verses academic segmentation exercises. Charles did recognise the need for data literate marketers working with data scientists (as advanced statisticians are now known).
All in all, a great day.
You can download the slides for the day from here: http://www.dataiq.co.uk/news/20140516/2014-sees-record-numbers-dataiq-now