NCR Brings Power to Marketers

NCR today released Customer Power 5.0, a new online marketing solution designed around using customer information and analytics to maximize marketing effectiveness, according to the company. Targeted for retail, financial, and catalog marketers, the new program combines NCR's customer analytic software, self-service technology, and e-commerce hosting capabilities to answer their needs, according to Sundeep Kapur, director of strategic marketing. "The data Customer Power 5.0 uses can be drawn directly from either an online or offline database, or through customer-interaction touch points," Kapur says. "That allows marketers to update their messages the same day a customer purchases a product or makes a transaction at a bank." Customer Power 5.0 is designed to enable marketers to draw from multiple databases to individualize their offerings to each customer through multiple channels. The new solution also is designed to allow marketers to fine-tune their offerings based on customer responses in real time. Customer touch points include ATMs, retail checkouts, Web sites, customer call centers, bank branches, and kiosks. Any resulting message can then be delivered across multiple channels, including email, phone, or direct mail. Additionally, because 5.0 has the ability to draw information from live data sources, a customer's reaction can be tracked automatically by marketers--future messages can be tailored appropriately. "Thanks to the automation we've figured that 5.0 will reduce a marketer's workload by 20 to 30 percent," Kapur says. "It's all about providing marketers with a continuous loop of customer transaction information and feedback, so [marketers] can focus their marketing campaigns." This use of customer analytics to drive the marketing functionality in 5.0 stemmed from feedback NCR research initiated about five years ago. Leading retailers, catalogers, and financial institutions responded, stating their desire to use their customer information in concert with analytics to improve their marketing efforts. Kapur points to a catalog retailer that is using 5.0 as a prime example. Instead of mailing generic catalogs to all its customers, the clothing company based its future catalog on transaction information, both in person at its stores, and through previous catalog orders. In response, the company sent out a 12-page catalog specifically targeted with products for its best customers. "A few years ago it was very popular to outsource your customer data to a third party and let them handle this," he says. "Today, I think you're beginning to see larger organizations and enterprises realize the importance of this data and are beginning to process this information in house. Certainly from a marketing standpoint, they're realizing the importance of it." Related articles: CRM Initiatives Through Mobile Marketing Experian Delivers Small-B2B Marketing Intelligence