LONDON, March 4, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

You've got customer data. Lots of it. Masses of records containing transaction data. Who bought what and when and how much they spent.

What you haven't got a lot of, is time. Fine-tuning your communications is essential, as customers respond better to marketing campaigns that take their specific needs into account. Addressing people as individuals drives up engagement.

It's no surprise that the 'spray and pray' approach is still in common usage. Organisations sending out communications to their entire customer base about a specific product or service, don't realise they alienate a wide part of their audience who won't be interested. The 'unsubscribe' button is only a click away.

To go trawling through a mountain of spreadsheets is a big headache for the deskbound, so it's understandable why companies go for the 'hosepipe' method or just run a quick sort in Excel so they find the top percentage of customers. These are clumsy ways to address your existing customers, and can be costly. With intelligent targeting, you can lower your costs and that results in higher ROI.

IBM^® have developed an intuitive solution that's more than just giving smart marketing to the time-poor. It generates visual insights and gives you crucial tools for customer retention and boosting engagement.

The SPSS^® software doesn't just delve into transactions, it also handles 'unstructured' data, website interactions and social media, discovering 'hidden relationships'. The power of Customer Analytics will highlight shopping behaviour and identify new trends. You're now learning much more about your customers, tapping into what really appeals to them.

With Customer Analytics driving your strategy, you can start a campaign with the end goal in mind. Define the values from the beginning, and take advantage of the real-time 'what if?' simulations in SPSS^® to see which is the best path to take.

It's more than just a time-saver; SPSS^® acts as an early warning system for your organisation, highlighting the small areas of concern that could blow up into a major problem if not addressed.

You have tracking and reporting tools as part of the suite, capabilities to score the 'lifetime' value of each customer and rich analysis of demographics, interactions and behaviour. You're ready to outperform your competitors and impress colleagues with a high ROI report.

The perfect introduction to SPSS^® is our 'Customer Analytics for Dummies' eBook, downloadable for free. (http://bitly.com/1jQnmkk)

The views of this release are Robert Tickell's own.

SOURCE IBM