• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 8, 2020

Want to reach people by email through all stages of the customer journey? You need analytics. 

That’s the main lesson of Real-Time Analytics—The Key to Unlocking Customer Insights & Driving the Customer Experience, a study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.

Of the firms polled, 58% have gained big increases in customer retention and loyalty from using real-time analytics. 

What’s more, 70% have increased their spend on this capability, and 32% have increased it by significant margins.

Still, only 16% say they are very effective at delivering real-time customer interactions across touchpoints and devices. And 30% say they are not effective.

Their challenges include:

• Legacy systems — 36%
• Data silos — 33%
• Organizational silos — 29%
• Multichannel complexity — 26%
• Insufficient budget/funding — 22%
• Legacy processes — 21%

Despite those hurdles, brands are turning to analytics to:

• Scale customer-centered decisions and actions across function in the business — 69%
• Design contextual customer engagements across their journey — 62%
• Gain accuracy in demand planning and product/services availability — 50%
• Address competitive and/or regulatory market pressures — 38%
• Better understand supply-chain dynamics — 23%

Contextual engagements are largely achieved through email, both on the promotional and transactional sides.

Meanwhile, 60% now say real-time analytics skills are now extremely important. And 79% say they will be in two years. But not everyone is there yet.

Here are the real-time capabilities ranked in order of importance, and the percentages saying they are successful:

• The ability to translate data into actionable insight at the optimal time — 22%
• Data accessibility (right data to the right people at the right time) — 21%
• The ability to access and use all available data (e.g., customer activity) in a seamless fashion — 18%
• The ability to predict, optimize, and forecast using trusted algorithms — 19%
• Organizational support for experimentation — 23%
• The ability to add/enhance data with new sources — 19%
• The ability to deploy proven analytic models and test new ones — 17%
• The ability to incorporate results into updated algorithms to provide closed-loop marketing — 14%
• Rapid prototyping/testing of analytic models — 15%

The survey found “sizable gaps between the importance of these key capabilities and how successful companies have been in achieving them.”

HBR surveyed 560 readers and HBR Advisory Council members.