TCS Releases Customer Intelligence & Insights for Retail

Tata Consultancy Services' Digital Software & Solutions Group has launched TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights for Retail, a software application that enables retailers to leverage data from in-store sensors or other Internet of Things (IoT) devices to deepen relationships with customers through more personalized customer engagement strategies.

Seeta Hariharan, general manager and group head of TCS Digital Software and Solutions, calls this newest offering "a fully integrated, industry-specific solution" to help retailers deal with some of their most pressing concerns, such as the need to better understand customers, provide more consistent service across channels, and anticipate customer needs.

For retailers to effectively serve their customers today, they need to be able to pull in data not just from internal systems, such as CRM, marketing, and back-office applications, but also from external sources, according to Hariharan.

"The Internet of Things is further blurring the lines between traditional and online retailing, forcing marketers to reconstruct the customer's journey with their brands across both physical and virtual worlds," she says.

Customer Intelligence & Insights for Retail helps them move from hit-or-miss marketing to highly relevant, timely interactions delivered in the right context, Hariharan points out. "With it, retailers can understand their customers better and segment them better," she says. The technology then allows them to "drive very personalized campaigns, drive offers based on the context of the customer and the location of the customer, and then measure the outcome from those campaigns."

TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights for Retail uses behavior-based customer personas that are continuously informed and refined using proprietary machine learning technologies, such as TCS' Adaptive Analytics Engine (A2E) and statistical algorithms, applied to demographic, social media, customer transaction, channel interaction, and loyalty data. The A2E technology improves the accuracy of highly personalized actions, offers, promotions, and other interactions designed to increase brand engagement.

"It's all about providing a 360-degree view of the customer," Hariharan says, "But it's more than that. It needs to be based on behavior."

The new software also enables retailers to build trusted consumer relationships over time by delivering valued, personalized experiences in the right context and driven by insights from a variety of real-world and online data sources. Retailers can use it to orchestrate scripted customer journeys with connected, relevant, and opportunistic interactions delivered to smartphones, tablets, or PCs.

Retailers are increasingly using IoT technologies to boost customer loyalty through customized marketing campaigns and to close sales. The recent TCS Global Trend study on IoT found that 50 percent of retailers are using IoT technologies to monitor customer data via mobile apps, and 27.9 percent are using it to track data via sensors in physical locations, such as stores.

TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights for Retail is one of several industry-specific solutions that TCS offers. The company launched a solution for banking in April 2015 and a solution for telecommunications and Internet service providers in 2014.

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