Use CEA as a strategic weapon to stay ahead of your competitors.

Everyone in business is both a provider and a consumer; therefore, using customer information is a key component to long-term success. This is a fast-moving field. For example, social networks cut both ways, publicizing good products and burying others. And the buzzwords, acronyms, tech-speak, and jargon can often be confusing. What's needed is a succinct description of the challenge, real-world examples, and step-by-step procedures for implementation.

Luckily, Dr. Arvind Sathi's book Customer Experience Analytics: The Key to Real-Time, Adaptive Customer Relationships does just that. Sathi presents the power, pitfalls, procedures, pathways, and payoffs for using customer information as a means to increase business and deliver a better experience. His background of working at IBM has given him an extensive knowledge of this growing field, and fortunately he knows how to convey his knowledge of optimizing customer experience analytics (CEA) in a useful way.

A technical expert, Sathi is good at explaining the technical, showing the practical, mapping a strategy, and giving the reader the means to implement CEA, all in an easy-to-read form.

It's easy to understand how important this field has become. Sathi notes, "These capabilities are redrawing competitive maps, wiping out established organizations, and replacing them with new ones. It will be interesting to see how leaders will use CEA as a strategic weapon to stay ahead of these changes."

Sathi describes how different industries can use similar models to increase their sales and customer loyalty, all the while using that same customer's data to improve the customer experience. There are even different names for those customers: subscribers, citizens, viewers, patients, and even drivers. From IT to financial institutions to communications and transportation, he describes how the data businesses already have, and can acquire, can help them in the future. His very specific guidelines, charts, and graphs give the reader a primer on how to do this.

He starts by defining not only CEA, but what makes a good customer experience and how information and analytics can be key to success. He describes the three emerging factors. First is the importance and power of these analytics. Second, he talks about the sophistication of the consumers themselves. They have more information and more avenues to acquire information than ever before. Third, he describes the power, both for good and bad, of the rising social networks. It's not just Facebook anymore, but Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and a myriad of other networks where people share their experiences.

Sathi gives precise, coherent advice and offers solutions to create CEA—from master data management to stream computing to predictive modeling to creating an analytics engine and ensuring privacy management.

You should be able to take his advice, tailor it to your organization, and begin to optimize CEA. If not, you'll likely be left behind because automation, the marketplace of customer information, and social awareness is changing the landscape on a daily basis.

Bill Rice is a technology marketer and founder of Humanized Communications, a digital marketing agency. He is a former editor of MC Showcase, is a former marketing communications director for Vision Solutions, and even did a stint as an IT manager for a shop that had an AS/400 model C10 (this just dated him). He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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