IBM Customer Engagement Forum – Australia

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The keynote presenter at IBM Australia's first Customer Engagement Forum was none other than Deepak Advani, WorldWide General Manager of IBM Commerce. Having only seen Deepak present through recorded sessions, many of the IBMers in attendance were eagerly anticipating the opening presentation of such an inspirational speaker. In typical style, Deepak took to the stage wearing his jeans which has become his signature look and in no time at all the hashtag #DeepJeans was trending through the audience. This change in style is just one small example of how IBM is seeking to connect with new customers in the digital world and reaching out beyond the traditional client industries like banking, telcos, insurance and moving into new areas like fashion, gaming and partnering with digital agencies.

According to Deepak, organisations need to leverage data, analytics and the cloud in order to build deeper, more valuable engagements with customers, partners and suppliers. "We're living in a world where consumers are in control, they're mobile and they're engaged on social," he said. "If they have a great experience, they won't be shy to tell all their friends. If they have a bad experience, they won't be shy telling the world."

So how does an organisation go about creating a great experience for customers? Deepak says this is through "moments of serendipity" where customers are surprised or delighted by a brand. With massive volumes of data available to organisations these moments of serendipity can now be engineered and delivered at scale, in the billions. "The more different types of data you can integrate and the more algorithms you run, the more precise the science is going to be," he said. "What's really important is understanding behavioural data and what's even more important, is attitudinal data, which is not only what they did, but why they did it. And delivering the right message at the right time is critical. Ultimately, it's about having message resonance."

In a later session Frank De Sa, CIO of The Just Group, demonstrated how his organisation is leveraging IBM Product Recommendations to deliver moments of serendipity to customers across their seven brands. Having rolled out an implementation of IBM Product Recommendations across nine websites in the space of two weeks The Just Group have seen incredible uplift in their online sales through delivering relevant and personalised recommendations to their customers. In a year where the retail industry was relatively flat The Just Group managed to grow their online channel by over 30% year on year. This was no mean feat given that their organisation was one of the earliest fashion apparel retailers to launch online back in 2001.

A hot topic on the agenda was IBM's new partnership with Facebook. Kiran Raghavan, Facebook's APAC head of marketing partnership, was on stage discussing the speed at which this new partnership has been developing. A very real example of this partnership was showcased at Melbourne Spring Fashion Week where IBM partnered with the City of Melbourne as the Official Innovation and Technology Partner. Through the IBM Marketing Cloud's Social Audiences a segment of 300 customer email addresses was uploaded to Facebook where "lookalike" audiences could be found through matching attributes of the uploaded segment to the wider Facebook community in Australia. This expanded the campaigns reach to an audience over 150,000 targeted people.

The afternoon was filled with insightful presentations from a range of speakers such as Chris Walls Echo Entertainment Group, Sam Kline from ANZ Bank and the delightful Lisa Claes from ING Direct who nearly had a few of us opening an account there and then after her compelling presentation on how ING strive to build customer loyalty.

If you would like any further information on the ways in which IBM can help you engineer moments of serendipity with your customers, talk to us at the new look IBM Commerce website.

Thanks,

Aidan

-IBM Digital Analytics Team

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