ARMONK, N.Y. and TAMPA, Fla., May 17,
2016 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an
expanded set of solutions and features including cognitive
technologies that allow brands to help deliver relevant customer
experiences. With these offerings marketers, merchandisers and
e-commerce professionals can learn, predict and guide customer
engagement at each step in their brand journey.
According to a new report from Nucleus Research, IBM delivers
$15.82 return on investment (ROI) for
every dollar spent on its marketing, sales, merchandising and
analytics offerings1 which today are being used by
leading brands such as ING Direct, The Home Shopping Network (HSN)
and Standard Life to meet the personalized, real-time needs of
their customers.
The importance of these experiences was highlighted in a recent
IBM Study, "Redefining Markets," where 66 percent of CxOs
stated they are interested in creating more digital, individualized
experiences. However, these moments cannot be isolated at different
times in the consumer/brand relationship.
IBM is infusing cognitive technologies into the tools that
practitioners work with today to help companies deliver these
complete end-to-end customer experiences. These new offerings will
leverage cognitive's ability to understand, reason and learn over
time and in the end provide teams with the expert in-the-moment
advice, insights and recommendations to help them make better, more
informed decisions at each step in the brand journey.
"Every customer is unique and has little tolerance for
businesses that fail to recognize their specific interests, wants
and needs," said Harriet Green,
General Manager, Watson IoT, Commerce and Education, IBM. "Today we
continue to invest in building our portfolio which includes new
cognitive solutions that will help completely transform how
companies serve each customer. Businesses will be able to quickly
understand, reason and learn from every customer interaction - and
put that knowledge to use to uncover new opportunities from
insights."
With IBM Real-Time Personalization, marketers will be able to
deliver the right message and offer to customers. Part of the IBM
Marketing Cloud, Real-Time Personalization understands that a
person's preferences change over time and addresses this through
its Cognitive Rule Adviser, which learns, advises and suggests the
offer and message should be shared with each visitor. It then
discovers which segments are responding best to each variation
(broken down by factors such as age, geography, etc..) and through
self-learning algorithms and analytics fine-tunes the experiences
over time.
For example, a sporting goods retailer identifies a customer
whose site profile indicates they are interested in taking up
cycling. Recognizing she's a novice, the site responds with deals
on bikes and everything she needs to get started, all presented
with visual images that help her make the right purchase. Through
its cognitive technologies, the site later learns that her needs
have shifted based on activity focused on nutrition for
long-distance rides, automatically adapts and shares content on
local races and nutrition recommendations as well as offers on
foods items in the store.
IBM also announced new cognitive technologies in Commerce
Insights, which provide merchandizers with a real-time view of
their business, specifically focused on how products and categories
are performing. Now with new cognitive-powered category sequencing
capabilities, the site automatically places products on a web page
based on current demand and inventory and adapts the sequencing as
sales and inventory levels change.
Commerce Insights is also infusing cognitive into its anomaly
detection capabilities so teams are automatically alerted to
significant spikes and dips in sales and presented contributing
factors such as inventory, promotional event, channel activities
and soon input from social sentiment and competitive pricing.
For example, Commerce Insights alerts the merchandiser that
inventory on the new 4K TVs is running low. Through its cognitive
category sequencing capabilities, it automatically re-order
products on the site's page so the items with low inventory levels
are dropped down until new shipments are received. Another alert
identifies a top video game consoles that's not selling as
projected and automatically discovers that the issue is caused by a
shift in competitor pricing. With this insight, it recommends the
retailer lower their offering price and shows what the resulting
margin will be so they are prepared for a sudden surge in
sales.
"At Performance Bicycle, we are committed to creating
experiences that are relevant for all of our customers, whether
it's a recreational rider or an avid cyclist," said Carol Wentworth, SVP Marketing, Performance
Bicycle. "By collaborating with IBM we will be seeing firsthand the
capabilities of cognitive technology to serve as a critical
advisor, recommending content for customers that is in-line with
their interests, expertise level as well as their intent at a
particular point in time."
Driving Continued Client Innovation
IBM helps the marketing, e-commerce practitioners and merchandising
professionals achieve their unique goals through a comprehensive
product portfolio that includes WebSphere Commerce. Today WebSphere
Commerce, which recently celebrated its 20th
anniversary, powers over 12,000 storefronts across the globe for
retailers such as 1-800-Flowers and Carhartt. In addition to
WebSphere Commerce IBM continues to innovate other components of
its portfolio including:
- Performance Insights: Part of the IBM Marketing Cloud,
Performance Insights automatically monitors, measures and predicts
a campaign's performance in near real-time, alerts teams when an
offer or campaign message is not resonating then provides insights
into the causes all in context.
- IBM Customer Experience Analytics: Integrates Tealeaf with
Journey Analytics, Digital Analytics, and customer behavior
analytics capabilities, giving brands a new layer of contextual
insights into the customer's entire journey.
- Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX): UBX differentiates IBM
Marketing and Customer Analytics solutions through an open
ecosystem where clients can easily leverage customer data to
enhance multi-channel experiences. Ensighten, the newest IBM
Business Partner to join UBX, brings integration with over 1,000
marketing technology vendors which will add additional new insights
that can help drive successful campaign performance.
Please join us for a Livestream press conference on this news
today, May 17 at 1:00pm EST. You can access the Livestream here.
The press conference will be hosted by Harriet Green, General Manager, Watson IoT,
Commerce and Education.
For more information, please click here and follow on Twitter at
#ibmamplify.
1.
|
Nucleus Research:
Enterprise Applications Research Note, Document Q82, May
2016
|
For More Information
Douglas
Fraim
IBM Media Relations
617-501-6376
dfraim@us.ibm.com
Lizette Kodama
IBM Media Relations
646-675-0750
lkodama@us.ibm.com
Logo -
http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO
To view the original version on PR Newswire,
visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-enables-brands-to-deliver-the-next-wave-of-consumer-experiences-300270132.html
SOURCE IBM