We can safely say that customer insight is an A-lister. It demands attention and courts the limelight. How to leverage data analytics to gain a ‘whole customer view’ and efforts to further understand customer interactions is seen less as the holy grail and more as latest news. Opportunities exist to transform knowledge of customers, better target and personalise their experience and enhance the overall client relationship.  How many are actually doing it well is harder to gauge. Discovery and prediction are powerful, they catapult decision making from reactionary to predictive and prescriptive.

Understanding citizens, and the relevance for government agencies is no less important.
Agencies may strive to resolve issues and therefore reduce client interaction with businesses aiming to increase contact, but the impact of analytics is still momentous. The Australian Taxation Office, having enhanced its data mining and analytics capabilities to be ‘data smarter’, is already matching different government and non-government data sets to identify those not complying with their tax obligations. A recent announcement of $61.9m over 4 years (including capital of $12.2m) to the Tax Office to upgrade its data analytics capability will further reinforce this strategy. Dr. Warwick Graco, Senior Data Miner at the ATO provided the following insights on the importance of the client experience.

A new and critical function for governments and businesses is business insight (BI). This function is focused on extracting insights and understandings from data, especially those on clients.

Analytics as the Lead

Analytics is having a significant impact on organisations with understanding clients and predicting what products and services are likely to meet their needs and expectations. A significant shift for governments is catching up with commercial organisations and the efforts they put into understanding citizens and therefore customising responses to their circumstances.

The emphasis for both governments and businesses should now be on the following:

1. Seeing the Whole Picture
Collecting external data to enrich the data the organisation has on clients to better understand their behaviours - i.e. their personalities, lifestyles, interests, attitudes and their needs. Attention is also on collecting data to understand the external forces that are influencing and shaping citizens' attitudes and reactions. An example is governments' policies on healthcare as this can impact on use of these services.

2. The Role of the Individual
Previously attention was given to segmenting populations to place citizens who have similar profiles in the same segment or bucket. Now attention is on segments where N=1. That is, the emphasis is on understanding the client as a unique individual. The use of analytics can assist to understand the client such as sentiment analysis can help to gauge the client's beliefs and feelings about issues such as whether the citizen either likes or dislikes a particular product.

3. Rave Reviews
The results of analytics and the findings gained from using other methods employed to understand clients can be used to provide client experiences targeted at addressing those issues that concern each client and are either urgent or at least important in terms of the client's priorities. If a service provider offers solutions that go a long way to meeting the client's core concerns and the provider is attentive, caring and understanding; it will be successful in winning the loyalty and support of the client and in increasing profits and/or reducing costs. For example, governments want to meet citizens' expectations for services and reduce return rates where, like sick patients that are never cured, they keep coming back for further help. In contrast, retailers want their profitable and satisfied customers to keep coming back for more goods and services as they increase profits. This will only happen if those providing services give their clients what they want in terms of enjoyable and satisfying experiences. Service providers require intelligence on clients to do this effectively.

The Rising Stars

In conclusion, a new and critical function for governments and businesses is business insight (BI). This function is focused on extracting insights and understandings from data, especially those on clients. Those who perform the BI function include those who do intelligence analysis, risk assessments, analytics, behavioural insights, business reporting and data management. The BI function is now on the same par as the human resource (HR) and the information technology (IT) functions in organisations. This function is the key to understanding clients and providing enriched client experiences that allow governments to provide customised services to citizens and enable businesses to offer tailored goods and services to customers.

The question of how organisations are effectively harnessing analytics to move from data to decisions informing their services will be explored in greater detail during dedicated sessions at the Chief Analytics Officer Forum taking place in New York, London, Sydney and San Francisco throughout 2016.

Thank you Dr. Warwick for sharing your thoughts with us, we look forward to hearing more at CAO Forum Sydney on 5-6 April 2016. See you there!

By: Kate Tappin

Kate Tappin is the Content Director for the inaugural APAC Chief Analytics Officer Forum. Consulting with the industry about their key challenges and finding exciting and innovative ways to bring people together to address those issues – For enquiries email: kate.tappin@coriniumintelligence.com