Multi/Omni-channel Customer Engagements with IBM Marketing Cloud

According to me, customer engagement through Digital Channels (email, sms, mobile push, web..) have to be unified, integrated and consistent.
IBM Marketing Cloud (powered by Silveprop) provides effective way to interact with customers, prospect or partners via different channels via an unified User Experience and Interface. (multi-channel), but also to start a journey on one channel and based on customer behavior, reaction, preferences to switch to a way other channels.

For example, through the automated campaign (just below), the communication starts (triggered by an event : subscription) by sending an email, then an other one if first one is opened and then based on link clicked in the second email, the third communication can be an email or a mobile push.

That campaign is fully designed via the web interface allowing you to describe the interaction journey with your customers.

Twitter, IBM Bluemix, Watson & Interact

IBM introduced couple of weeks ago IBM Watson Developer Cloud with a variety of services for building cognitive apps. One of them is very relevant in Marketing activities: Watson User Modeling.

The IBM Watson User Modeling service uses linguistic analytics to extract cognitive and social characteristics, including Big Five, Values, and Needs, from communications that the user makes available, such as email, text messages, tweets, forum posts, and more. By deriving cognitive and social preferences, the service helps users to understand, connect to, and communicate with other people on a more personalized level.

I have prototyped a solution using Watson User Modeling service analysing 200 customer's tweets from Twitter and using the cognitive and social characteristics coming from Watson User Modeling to push the most relevant offer to that customer.

High-level architecture of the solution:

Examples of scenario:

1/ A customer is on the WebSite  Acme Inc., a travel agency, looking for his future travel destination. As a known customer, Acme Inc. has already built his profile based on demographics and his previous navigation history. But, Acme Inc can implement cognitive segmentation to push some special offers based on the personality of the customer like "Adventurousness".

2/ A customer is on his mobile retail application, looking for a product to buy. Instead of just using Product recommendation or previous purchase approaches, the retailer can have implement Watson capabilities in his offer recommendation engine.

...

Products Used:

- IBM Interact: With IBM® Interact, marketers can personalize, in real time, the experience of customers interacting with websites, call centers and other inbound marketing channels. 

- IBM Bluemix: an open-standards, cloud-based platform for building, managing, and running apps of all types, such as web, mobile, big data, and smart devices

- IBM Watson Developer Cloud: a bold new partnership between people and computers, providing you the tools and resources to create cognitive apps 

- Twitter: as source of customer non-structured information helping to retrieve cognitive and social characteristics, in my case "Openness to change". But, other informations are available like "Artistic interests", "Imagination", "Self-discipline", "Excitement-seeking"...

Flow of the process:

When the user accesses to one personalized channel of communication with Acme Inc (Mobile, Web...), Interact is requested to return the best offer or a list of offers. In the Interactive flowchart, a "CallOut" is done to retrieve the score of a specific social or cognitive characteristic. A process is running on the Bluemix platform. Based on the request containing the twitter account of the customer, the process will retrieve the last 200 tweets and send that content to Watson User modeling process to obtain the requested score for that customer.

Finally, via that score, we can determine if that customer is eligible for that special offer.

IBM Bluemix Interface: 

I have one Liberty Profile and one service for Watson user Modeling running on Bluemix.

IBM Interact Interface:

Flowchart with a Select box

Select Box Configuration

My ExternalCallout (Watson_Mood) method return "Open" with the score provided by Watson user Modeling is greater than 50 and "Not_Open" if lower.

That new technology opens new possibilities to provide advanced personalization in real-time or in batch for Marketers. We are just at the beginning of a beautiful journey...

More to come...

Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012 & IBM Strategy

This month at Barcelona, Gartner highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2012.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 include:

1. Media Tablets and Beyond
2. Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces
3. Contextual and Social User Experience
4. Internet of Things
5. App Stores and Marketplaces
6. Next-Generation Analytics
7. Big Data
8. In-Memory Computing
9. Extreme Low-Energy Servers
10. Cloud Computing      

IBM is already deeply involved in several of these technologies. 
I just want to share with you some examples of IBM involvements.


Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces:
IBM already proposes solutions to help its customers to design, mobile-centric applications for B2C, B2E or B2B.

Mobile Commerce experience via WebSphere Commerce:

IBM Mobile Portal:
That solution is an advanced content adaptation product that helps enterprises and service providers deliver portal content to a broad range of mobile devices, providing customized mobile access to portal solutions and services via a highly navigable, personalized Web experience

IBM Web Experience Factory:  
That solution provides a Java™ Platform based rapid application development environment.
IBM Web Experience Factory supercharges delivery of enterprise ready, standards based, Web 2.0 applications with rich, interactive interfaces that deliver exceptional web experiences. It also provides flexible rendering capabilities with support for the most popular Smartphone devices including Apple® iPhone®, Android™ and BlackBerry®.

Contextual and Social User Experience:

IBM Project Vulcan: a blueprint for the future of collaboration
IBM Project Vulcan is designed to exploit the convergence of:

• Cloud and on-premise systems
• Collaborative Services business applications and social networks
• Desktops, netbooks and mobile devices

IBM Project Vulcan is the first expression of the advanced properties needed to create next generation collaboration systems. Social analytics, pioneered by IBM Research will be used to reduce the growing problem of personal information overload by providing recommendations to locate expertise, relevant content, and critical business events.
 

App Stores and Marketplaces:
IBM Mobile Technology preview provides you with the opportunity to evaluate experimental technologies from IBM to develop and run mobile applications. The preview is focused on creating a cross-platform solution that abstracts and unifies mobile device and operating system specifics to lower your mobile application development, deployment, and management costs.

The preview also introduces an application centric management infrastructure that provides basic support for central control over the mobile applications and allows developers to better tune their applications for central management (link).

Next-Generation Analytics:

IBM Business Analytics software provides you with actionable insights that allow you to answer these critical business questions:

• How are we doing?
• Why?
• What should we be doing?

Big Data:
Big data represents a new era in data exploration and utilization, and IBM is uniquely positioned to help clients navigate this transformation. IBM InfoSphere® BigInsights and IBM InfoSphere Streams are the core technologies of IBM's platform for big data (link).

Cloud Computing:
Just one word IBM SmartCloud...

As you can see IBM is well-positioned to help you in 2012.