Gain Deeper Insights with Predictive Analysis

Wayne Gretzky once said: "A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be."

In the same vein, business intelligence (BI) is used to help make better decisions on how to improve business processes, deliver better customer service, generate more business from existing and new customers, and giving a company strong differentiation from its competitors.

Predictive analysis can give deeper insight into patterns, such as which products influenced the purchase of others, or which customers are more likely to buy certain products bundled together. Being able to correlate what a customer purchase with when they are likely to purchase again would help drive campaigns to reach them at the right time with the right offerings.

Anticipate future needs of the customer

• identify trends such as poor customer service and correlate complaints to customer churn
• survey customer to find out what purchase criteria is the most important to them: price, service, choice, premiums, etc.
• use purchasing information tied to a customer loyalty program to understand which products are purchased together, by whom and when
• expand into more departments, such as hr, to help predict which job applicants are going to make a commitment to their job
• identify and predict equipment maintenance in manufacturing

IDC has found that the median ROI for BI projects using predictive analysis technologies was 145 percent, compared with a median ROI of 89 percent for projects without them.

Schedule a Predictive Analysis BI Demo and find out the value it would add to your decision-making.

Are you ready to take your business online?

• Are your customers frustrated that they have to pick up the phone to find out the status of their order, would you like to offer them self-service functionality online?

• Are you lagging behind your competitors in offering automated availability of products and firm shipping dates?

• Have you automated your stock replenishment with your back orders?

• Do you have a good way of suggesting to your customers that it's time to reorder an item when they log in to their account?

Here is some of the functionality our eCommerce customers requested for their eCommerce systems. Could your business use some of these options?

1. Present the information you want, the way you want it, with user-definable synchronization between your Web store and your accounting system.
2. Authorize transactions from customers automatically and register new Web customers instantly.
3. Established web customers have the ability to access existing pricing, terms, and discounts for online purchases.
4. Process online orders automatically by interacting with your accounting systems Order Entry.
5. Implement a common audit trail for all transactions, where orders can be audited either at the order entry module or on your web site.

Integration with your accounting system is important but if you are a manufacturer, so is integration with your manufacturing system. Such integration leads to automatic order flows, so that the work orders you need to build the product exactly to your customer’s specification are generated within the parameters you set up in manufacturing. The sales order is also linked to manufacturing software modules to create a soft bill of materials from the configured order.

Don't think of ecommerce as 'just' selling online, it's so much more. Contact us to make your web site work for you. Schedule an eCommerce demo for your business today.

The ROI of Social Media Monitoring

What started out as a means for people to connect socially online has turned out to be a useful business tool. How useful? And should you care about the questions being asked on walls, in groups and communities anywhere online? You should, as your competitors may be the ones providing the answers.

The B2C pioneers who adopted social media as a means to strengthen their brands with consumers have a huge advantage over B2B marketers: they've been doing it for years. They discovered along the road that social media strategies resulted in significant benefits, such as:

• Risk reduction
• Customer advocacy
• Consumer insights generation
• Customer service cost reduction

How can social media strategies benefit my business? >>>

WAC Consulting Group 367 West Main Street Northborough, MA 01532

Robert Distler rdis@wacinc.com