company via other channels if they experience a problem with a mobile transaction.
"Complete customer insight with actionable information requires businesses to have contextually related information on how customers interact with the business (via email, social, phone, in-person), who their customers are (their attributes, characteristics, and demographics), their activity (behavioral data, usage, and payment history), and why they behave the way they do (their opinions, preferences, and needs)," Bisconti writes.
Putting IBM's ExperienceOne Customer Solution to Work
The data mined from Twitter will be processed not just through Watson but also by IBM's customer solution tools that comprise ExperienceOne, launched in May.
ExperienceOne's solutions aren't new, but are the culmination of acquisitions IBM has made over the past four years that blends the disjointed business units together under one umbrella.
The acquisitions are:
- Coremetrics, which provides digital and Web analytics;
- Unica, which offers cross-channel campaign management to automate marketing and provide deeper understanding of customer preferences;
- DemandTec, which provides pricing and promotion optimization services;
- Tealeaf Technology, which offers digital customer experience management and customer behavior analysis solutions;
- Xtify, which provides mobile customer engagement through push notifications; and
- Silverpop, which offers digital marketing that personalizes customer engagements.
"Earlier this year, we felt that the work we had done to drive integration and unification of this portfolio had reached a point where essentially none of the brands underlying the portfolio represented accurately what we wanted to reflect in the marketplace," says Jay Henderson, director of strategy, IBM ExperienceOne. "The name was very deliberately chosen. We wanted to put [out there that] the end goal is that we are trying to enable our clients to achieve better customer engagement and experience, as opposed to focusing on any one discipline within the organization, instead of talking about this by organizational roles or disciplines."
With that in mind, instead of segmenting sales, marketing, and customer service units, ExperienceOne is aimed at breaking down departmental silos. "We wanted to acknowledge that excellent customer experience is the responsibility of the entire organization," Henderson says. "You're seeing this desire to integrate what's happening from a marketing and branding perspective down to the way of how customers are getting serviced."
Some industry analysts, including Miller, believe that IBM will continue to harness social media data from other sites. "I don't rule out that there would be Facebook feeds and other metadata that's out there that they're capturing," he says. "I'm sure IBM is talking to other social networks but they might not have as much incentive [as Twitter]."