February 19, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

Teradata Updates Customer Interaction Manager with Predictive Analytics

Data analytics platform and marketing application provider Teradata unveiled the latest version of its Customer Interaction Manager tool. A reaction to the growing demand among marketers for more actionable data, the seventh edition of Teradata's solution offers more data access, better visualization capabilities, and embedded predictive analytics to help marketers make data-driven decisions that promise to boost revenue.

"Our customers have been asking us to improve our solution and enable them to build better relationships with consumers. Consumers receive marketing messages all the time, but too often, the content is not relevant—this is because marketers don't have access to the kind of data that would make it relevant," Deb Woods, vice president of Teradata product marketing for Customer Interaction Management, says.

Typically, Woods explains, marketers rely on the IT department and data scientists to gather data, analyze it, and forward the processed information to marketers. With the new functionality of the Customer Interaction Manager, however, marketers are able to run a predictive analytics model against previous campaigns to better target future outreach. The predictive analytics tool allows marketers to connect to previous campaigns, and attributes old characteristics to new sets, predicting how upcoming campaigns will perform. The model can also learn over time, and deliver increasingly accurate predictions.

"Marketers that can target prospects based on past behaviors can significantly increase conversion rates, so the predictive analytics capability ties right into revenue," Woods says, citing a recent Jupiter Research report which found that targeting consumers based on behaviors such as opening an email or visiting a Web page can boost conversion by up to 350 percent.

In addition to in-depth predictive analytics, the update to Teradata's Customer Interaction Management solution also includes the Open Access feature, which allows marketers to pull up data from multiple databases such as Teradata, Oracle, and SQL Server and multiple data sources including Web and social activity, structured lists, and call center data.

The updated tool also has an expanded data visualization capability, mobile-enabled dashboards, and a "game-changing" enhanced real time integration manager, according to Woods. Through a partnership with Celebrus, a Web-tagging solution provider, Customer Interaction Manager can, in real time, track Web browsing behaviors such as cart abandonment, social media interactions, and email openings, giving marketers the power to deliver highly personalized and targeted offers. "The real-time tracking tool allows marketers to create better, more timely content for consumers, and ultimately, build loyalty," she explains.

The solution is best suited for enterprise and midmarket companies, but can work on different scales. Now available as both an on-premises and cloud solution, Teradata's improved Customer Interaction Manager is all about making marketers' lives easier, according to Woods.

"We're giving marketers a ton of power to make key decisions based on a wealth of data that's clear, accessible, and constantly updated. By bypassing IT, we're saving marketers precious time and helping them utilize their limited budgets effectively," she says. "Teradata is really the only solution in the marketplace that offers embedded predictive analytics, and it gives the kind of actionable insight that is hard for marketers to find," she adds.