Because of the digital nature of the marketplace, behavioral analytics is a natural advertising model for social and wireless networks, search engine portals, demographic providers, and content websites – it is however most important to today’s enterprises across all its available consumer channels.  In this section we will discuss how a behavioral analytics strategy and framework can be constructed by enterprises for relevant and real-time business intelligence.  

The same process of real-time segmentation by age, gender, lifestyle, shopping preferences and other assortments of demographics or other behavioral data as performed by web, wireless and social networks in their positioning of products, services and content can be leveraged by agile enterprises either thru a subscription model, or by constructing it in-house – or through a combination of both.

Most importantly all of these services, techniques, and networks can today be replicated at the enterprise level for up and cross selling, customer lifetime valuation and sustained growth profitability by all types of companies large and small.  The browser is the consumer – as such an enterprise needs to have a strategy for using their website as the core to their marketing efforts via behavioral analytics.  

Enterprises need to leverage the information they currently posses as part of their overall marketing and customer service efforts.  Enterprises need to form a strategy for capturing and analyzing the behavior of future customers – they need to ask themselves “who are my customers now, and who is likely to be my future one?”  Knowing the core features of its customers is critical and crucial to enterprises, which behavioral analytics can provide.  

Every enterprise has streams of transactional and behavioral data flowing to it 24/7 but few of them are able to mine them simultaneously as events take place – enabling them to make relevant offers to their new and existing customers – at the moment they interact with them, irregardless of the medium: text, phone, email, web, or storefront.  Careful and strategic planning by enterprises can leverage customer behaviors enabling to mutually benefit both.  

Digital enterprises however must be aware of the valuable intelligence that is flowing to them from their current and future customers – they must be proactive and aggressive in formulating a strategic plan for capturing and leveraging all of these streams of customer data.  With every customer ‘event’ consumers are communicating with companies their needs and desires.  Behavioral analytics is leveraging these customer events, most of which start at their website but cascade across other operational systems within an enterprise.  

Today, with the advent of the web, mobile, chat, text, blogs and email, new real-time behavioral analytics are required for a faster and more relevant way to interact with consumers as events take place.  Data warehouses were built for reflection not reaction, which is what is required for behavioral analytics.  To enable enterprises to intelligently interact with their current and future customers – for sustained streams of revenue growth and superior customer service – networks of behavior models need to be created and linked. 

Everyday consumers are bombarded with irrelevant marketing messages on the Web, email, wireless and other media.  Smart enterprises are starting to realize that to communicate over this fray of irrelevancy they must come to understand, leverage and model each of their customers’ behavior and preferences in order to provide personalized communications.  To accomplish and succeed at this objective, a behavioral analytics strategy is required by enterprises.   

Behavioral analytics can be accomplished at any consumer touch point; however enterprises must carefully plan on how they will capture and create important consumer data streams.  The problem for enterprises is that these consumer data streams from websites, call sites, processing centers, email servers and an array of other transactional legacy systems are scattered in different locations, each in unique formats performing diverse operations in a totally disjointed manner. 

There are several Internet mechanisms such as log files, cookies, beacons, forms, JavaScript, databases, email servers, call site and transactional software which can be enlisted to create consumer data streams for an enterprise.  There are also real-time demographics products – they offer lifestyle clusters segments and profiles – which can be used to enhance the quality of internal consumer data streams, in order to gain a more customer-centric view and precise ensemble of segmentation models from behavioral analytics.