Published on the 18/05/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

In a world where mass personalisation is the norm, intelligent interactions with customers will define business success…

Looking for competitive advantage? You’ll find it in the way you’re able to anticipate and meet the needs of your customers, with customer experience the new competitive battleground.

That’s according to the director of product development for SAS’ customer intelligence division Ryan Treichler, who pointed out that providing better customer experiences is all about using data effectively. “While the concepts of customer intelligence and customer experience are very simple, they can also be very hard to get right,” he said.

The real challenge, of course, comes with scale: companies dealing with thousands – or hundreds of thousands – of customers require appropriate tools to gather, analyse and use information effectively to deliver the sort of mass personalisation which we expect today.

While primarily known as a business intelligence software vendor (and the world’s biggest privately owned software company), SAS has for some time also provided marketing technology, which Treichler describes as a natural evolution for the business. “We help our customers provide better customer experiences,” he said, “and that means leveraging data and analytics for customer experience. SAS started as an analytics provider, moving on to data management – if you do analytics, you need the data – and then there is an integration component and from there, you move into channel-specific [vertical] solutions.”

In Australasia, said Treichler, SAS is working with a range of customers, notably some of the major publishers, real estate companies, and (its more traditional hunting ground) the financial services sector.

Perhaps obviously, delivering customer experiences depends on having – and using – some of their information; personalisation is only possible if a service provider knows something about you. Getting the information which equips any given organisation to do that can be difficult, but Treichler said the trick is to ask the right questions. “When you poll people you can typically get the answers you want depending on how you ask the question. The problem is, a lot of marketers aren’t taking advantage of that optimally and that can mean they have the wrong information which takes customers down a path that is not relevant.”

For example, delivering an offer for a new iPhone to a customer who just purchased one last week is a clearly wasted effort. It could even be annoying, the very antithesis of the customer engagement process.

“Marketers want to build a real time customer state, a picture of you, so that they can communicate with you in a way that makes sense. What they do not want to do is take you most of the way into an engagement only to finish with an offer which is irrelevant. Instead of delight, the risk is that you could piss them off.”

While Treichler said most companies he is talking to are digitally sophisticated, and that SAS software is designed for people with some level of analytics capability, he added that is has recently introduced ‘analytics helpers’ in its new Customer Intelligence 360 suite. “We’re looking at ways to hit an ‘easy’ button, so if you don’t have data scientists, you can still get in and do stuff. Clients want to build their own competitive advantage through better customer experiences; if, for example, you’re using Adobe Creative Suite like everyone else, well that gives everyone the same things.”

And the same things do not competitive advantage make; nor will they win the fight for fickle customers.