Customer Intelligence
If you’re ready to move from marketer to experience maker, you’ve come to the right place. Here you can dive into a curated collection of study materials, organised into seven lessons. And learn to turn real-time customer insights into actions that drive results.
Nicolas Mériel is no ordinary marketer. He continually pushes the boundaries of digital marketing to create outstanding customer experiences.
As senior digital strategist for Swisscom, his focus is on understanding customer behaviour to create personal experiences that are as relevant and positive as possible. But he couldn’t do it without the help of a great digital toolbox — including analytics, AI, automation and targeting. Good data, backed by good analytics, helps Swisscom turn real-time insights into real results.
Combined, these tools help Swisscomo gain a deeper understanding of their customers, build unique audience profiles and connect instantly with them, one-on-one.
“We have a My Swisscom app and inside the app we had a teaser banner that said, ‘Shake your device.’ With Adobe, we could detect which device you had in your hand and then trigger an experience that was device specific. If you come with an iPhone, why should we show you a new app download from the GooglePlayStore?”
— Nicolas Mériel, Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
Master this marketing art to do the same for your business.
We’ve organised your Customer Intelligence study materials into seven lessons - each easily completed in 30 minutes or less. Work through one goal at a time. Apply what you learn to your current situation, then dive deeper into the next lesson.
01 | Analyse all channels.
Businesses seem to have plenty of data these days. But they can’t always act on it — especially if they’re using free analytics software. According to a London Research study, companies using paid analytics solutions are 48% more likely than those using free software to get actionable insights. “Many people are using analytics as a data collection dump or a data filter,” says Amber Thornton, product marketing manager at Adobe. “They’re collecting some data and creating reports, but they aren’t doing anything with it.”
That approach just won’t fly any more. Nor can you look at just one specific channel or device. You need to think bigger and look at the entire journey your customers take — from first interaction to final purchase or drop off. “It’s about the orchestration of experiences — off-line and online,” says Mériel.
When you understand your customers’ behaviours and preferences throughout their journeys, you can do the amazing — deliver incredibly relevant experience across any channel or device.
Learn why your customer data is so valuable and how to get the most insight from all your data sources.
Understand Your Data
Read article (12-15 min.)
02 | Do more with AI.
Understanding what makes your customers tick will make you a better marketer. And now you have AI-powered analytics to help. It can help you to discover insights you never even considered, then turn those insights into action with personalised, relevant customer experiences.
Gartner says it simply, “Enterprises that are able to harness diverse customer data through analytics to provide more relevant customer experiences will win.”
Swisscom had been doing a lot of AB testing but realised they needed a more automated approach to scale the audiences. Now with AI and automation, Mériel says they get better results by identifying customer behaviour patterns without any prior analysis. With AI-powered analytics, you, too, can discover insights you never even considered.
Learn how AI and machine learning can assist, augment and amplify your work, taking away stress and tedious activities.
Artificial Intelligence Unlocks the True Power of Analytics
Read the report (7-10 min.)
“One of the big benefits of using web analytics software is that it automatically tunes the website experience to each individual visitor.”
— Nicolas Mériel, Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
03 | Study best practices.
You can create amazing experiences when you blend online and off-line insights and interactions to get a single, deeper view of your customers. “Some brands are able to use their data to paint a beautifully complete portrait of their customers. Others are still drawing stick figures,” says Ben Gaines, Adobe group product manager. “The businesses that are ahead of the curve are the ones that have aligned their internal teams, processes and technologies to capture and draw actionable insights from all of their data.”
Gaining a more complete view of your customers is just one best practice. The article below has several others that will help you turn data into actionable insights.
Learn how to narrow your focus, jumpstart your implementation and find the right people to set you up for success.
Turn Customer Data into Customer Intelligence
Read the report (7-10 min.)
04 | Know your audience.
Deep inside your data is a greater understanding of what delights your individual customers. And a data management platform (DMP) will help you mine it. It combines data from every channel and device to reveal how the people behind the devices engage with your brand. “Delivering a great experience really begins with the data,” says Gordon Ho, senior vice president of global marketing and sales at Princess Cruises. “We use our data management platform as our central data warehouse, acting as the foundation for us to drive customer insight.”
Markus Eberhard, former senior vice president online and crosschannel development at Swisscom, couldn’t agree more. He believes analytics is one of the biggest assets they have. “You need targeting to bring the right stuff to the right people. And you need analytics insights to understand what people look at, what they like, what they don’t like. The combination of that is absolutely fundamental for success.”
Learn how a DMP differs from a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to help you to deliver the right message at the right time to create amazing customer experiences.
05 | Learn from leaders.
Swisscom is mastering the art of customer intelligence. They try to have one test a week and have it run for two weeks to get enough people. After doing about 60-70 tests, they’ve achieved an average uplift of 40 per cent.
There are many other organisations you can look to for similar inspiration. Redtag.ca, Canada’s largest independent travel agency, wanted to know more about their customers on a daily basis but they couldn’t do it with the free analytics tool they were using.
After completely revamping their tool set, their customer knowledge soared. “Day to day I’ll come in, see my site traffic, my conversions and I think I’ve got to the point now that if I see X-numnber of visits, I can already guess how many conversions I expect to have,” says chief digital officer Robert Gennaro.
Learn how other leading companies are gaining insights to deliver deeply relevant experiences throughout the customer journey.
Swisscom: Ideal Partner for Digital Transformation
Read story (5-7 min.)
Swisscom achieved an average uplift in web traffic of 40%
06 | Explore top tools.
Choosing which customer intelligence solution to use is an important decision and you’ll want the utmost confidence in your choice. That starts by evaluating the options out there.
There are many questions you’ll need to investigate:
• Can this solution collect data from all the sources that matter to me?
• Can it grow to accommodate new sources in the future?
• Does it run anomaly detection and automatically flag outlier data?
• How will it help me to take action on the insights it provides?
While the research wil take some effort, it will be well worth it. You can start by studying the guide below.
Learn how your marketing and IT teams can work together to select the right analytics solution.
When IT matters. The right solution starts with the right conversation
Read article (7-10 min.)
“The Adobe solutions are our digital Swiss Army knife. They have the right tools for every situation to offer our customers the right experience and the solutions complement each other perfectly.”
— Nicolas Mériel, Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
07 | Prove business value.
You’ve learnt all the benefits of customer intelligence and how to implement the best solutions. The next step is to build your business case, so analytics becomes a top priority for others in your organisation. But don’t try to do it alone. Look to the experts who’ve evaluated customer analytics solution providers and have shared their findings.
Build a business case for customer intelligence. Explore top solutions and see what kind of ROI you can realise.
Know Your Customers. Grow Your Bottom Line
Read the Forrester report (25-30 min.)
Build a business case for customer intelligence. Explore top solutions and see what kind of ROI you can realise.
About the experience maker
Nicolas Meriel
Nicolas Mériel thinks outside the box. In addition to being called “a profound thinker,” he received the #1 prize in the “Mindblowing Optimisation” contest for his “SHAKE (Super Hot Amazing Killer Experiences) campaign. He also received the Adobe Experience Business Award in Excellence in AI-Powered Personalisation. With 15 years of online experience, he’s an international digital transformation expert — where the six languages he speaks must come in handy. (Catalan, English, French, German, Spanish and Swedish.)
Adobe can help
Our products will give a deeper understanding of each customer and help you to deliver amazing experiences that drive results.
Don’t stop now. Master another marketing art.
Now that you’re a Customer Intelligence expert, it’s time to take on a new marketing art. Choose one below, then work your way through that collection of guides, videos, inspiration articles and more — all created and curated by Adobe experts to help you to become an epic experience maker.
Experience foundation
Deliver thousands of personal experiences with a unified, cloud-based experience foundation.
Campaign orchestration
Be everywhere your customers are — with a consistent brand experience.
Content velocity
Keep audiences engaged with brilliant content that’s perfectly timed.
Enrolment & communications
Make your enrolment forms and applications effortless for all.