A recent study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in collaboration with SAS, Intel, and Accenture Applied Intelligence provides these and other noteworthy discoveries. The 16-page report combines survey answers with marketing performance data from businesses to provide a quick, interesting read. Customer insights can only be unlocked and driven through real-time analytics. Customer analytics, according to The Customer Experience, are crucial for enhancing customer experiences across all marketing, selling, and service channels used by a company.

Customer analytics will increase in importance from 60% of corporate business leaders today to 79% by 2020, with personalisation at scale serving as a major motivator. By continuously adjusting every component of the marketing mix for each customer audience or persona in real-time, businesses that successfully implement customer analytics today are focusing on the objective of delivering personalisation at scale. The most successful businesses have created machine learning algorithms that understand when and how to promote upsells and products, change prices based on demand, and employ competitive pricing methods.

Enterprises are building real-time marketing technology stacks to scale real-time customer analytics cross-functionally (69%) as the main growth driver. Large-scale firms are initially driven to engage in real-time customer analytics by the desire to realise the dream of a customer-centric enterprise. Creating and enhancing contextual engagements across customer journeys (62%), improving demand forecasting accuracy and product/service availability (50%) and better addressing and resolving competitive and regulatory market pressures (39%) are further contributing business reasons.

Only 16% of respondents said their brands were extremely effective at delivering real-time interactions across several channels, despite the benefit of employing real-time customer information to increase revenue. Additionally, 30% said they were completely ineffective. There is a significant discrepancy between what real-time customer analytics business cases suggest as potential contributions and what some businesses actually achieve. There needs to be more attention paid to and work put into figuring out how to make customer analytics contributions possible, as the majority of corporate leaders (60%) believe that providing real-time customer interactions is extremely critical today and 79% by 2020.

Real-time customer analytics are currently providing the most business value when it comes to enhancing customer experiences (85%), which in turn improves customer retention and loyalty (58%) and profitability. The development of a real-time marketing technology stack is paying dividends for businesses by providing comprehensive customer data and intelligence. The report gives examples of how H&R Block, a market leader in tax preparation and consulting services, using real-time customer analytics to make sure every interaction with customers is fruitful.