IBM/Acxiom Partnership Focuses on Predictive Analytics and More Compelling Customer Engagement

IBM and Acxiom recently announced a new partnership designed to empower data scientists to make faster and more accurate predictions by providing powerful analytics tools and curated data on IBM Cloud. This curated data can ultimately lead to stronger and more compelling customer engagement.

Loyalty360 caught up with Sachin Shah, Director of Customer Analytics Solutions, IBM Analytics; and Rick Erwin, President and General Manager, Audience Solutions Division, Acxiom Corporation, to discuss this unique partnership.

How will this partnership impact customer engagement/CX and what makes it unique?

Shah: Predictive analytics can be applied to customer engagement and richer customer data will drive better outcomes.

By using unique, curated data sets along with first-party data to reflect customer behavioral attributes, clients can determine initiatives like planned IBM/Acxiom product integrations for better customer engagement.

What factors prompted this partnership and what are your goals for it?

Shah: Clients are always looking for an edge to being more relevant with their end-customer such as being more engaging. Often, they are working on data sets that are not facilitating this level of relevancy, whether that is due to the quality of data they have or lack thereof. Allowing easier access to curated data sets is desirable in today’s market. This data helps clients improve their prediction and, hence, outcomes. Our goal is to reduce time to value for our solutions, improve predictions, and aid our clients to attract, grow, and retain clients.

Erwin was posed with the same questions.

How will this partnership impact customer engagement/CX and what makes it unique?

Erwin: Customer Engagement covers a wide variety of interpretations, but most would agree that it is the overall set of capabilities that leads a brand to connect authentically with customers and to build a level of relationship with them that is voluntarily sustained. Critical in that set of capabilities is the ability to use appropriately permissioned data to better meet your customers’ needs.

For many years, organizations have been investing money in software and services to help them better understand their customers’ data, and software companies have developed extraordinary capabilities for visualizing customer data, drawing inferences from it, and producing predictive and even prescriptive models to anticipate customer needs and wants and “surprise and delight.” But, in practical terms, the work of the analysts and data scientists that trawl through data and produce those insights has been hampered by the very unsexy work of getting the right data available in their software. It’s not uncommon for companies to find they’ve paid a premium for data scientists only to find that their talent is consumed with acquiring and manipulating data, in lieu of actually deriving the models and insights needed to move the needle.

What IBM and Acxiom are doing together is to simplify this complex back-end through a combination of IBM’s software and Acxiom’s data services, so that more analysts’ and data scientists’ time can be freed up to actually work on the business opportunities that good quality customer data can reveal. By doing so, our clients can deliver better insights faster, and better meet the needs and expectations of their customers in a world of increasing competition for their attention.

In the past, it’s been common for software companies and data companies to leave the hard work of integration to the end user, with its associated time to market and cost. With this partnership, we hope to shortcut that effort and help make the talent inside our respective client organizations more effective, and help them apply it faster to their customer relationships and engagement strategy. 

What factors prompted this partnership and what are your goals for it?

Erwin: A recognition that neither software nor data alone can solve the most challenging problems of customer engagement in today’s complex world. IBM produces some of the most sophisticated analytics software in the world and we plan to help IBM’s software clients be more immediately impactful by providing them with the right data to utilize that software to its fullest extent quickly and efficiently. For Acxiom, it extends our strategy of being the connective tissue in the marketing ecosystem – of helping bring the right data to the right place at the right time, given our many years of expertise of finding, curating and distributing data to the fingertips of the users that need it. Our goal is to continue to compress the distance and time from data acquisition to data application – to help harness the powerful potential of data to strengthen connections between people, businesses, and their partners.

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