2017 Will Be The Year of Dynamic Business Intelligence

Last year, Affino development was largely focused on ramping up the Core Affino CRM - giving the heart of the system more capability, greater power and an extended reach. For most of our Clients this is already the core Business Processes tool - which harnesses key critical operational activities and seamlessly combines them through one highly connected and always-on central resource.

Unlike comparable systems, much of the business intelligence, and all of the routing is already incorporated in the default offering. Of course there is some degree of setup involved, but Affino takes much of the heavy lifting out of it. We already have a core Automation Engine - the Automated Customer Ladder - which encompasses both Sales and Marketing Automation, as well as Business Process Automation, Incentivisation and Rewards.

The most significant evolution in 2017 will be the introduction of a new AI layer which ’learns’ from all the interactive processes present, and will be able to predict consumer behaviour using augmented cognitive analysis and probability modelling. For all of this to work properly, you need the following 7 elements to cleverly combine:

Engagement

This is how many contact points there are between your business and your customers - how easy it is to get in touch - whether interaction, participation or transaction. Affino’s combination of CMS, DAM, Ecommerce, Social elements, Messaging and Targeting - gives you one of the largest potential surface area of touch points. When gathering data, it is important that you can be precise in your application of business processes and routines - hence the more contact points you have, the greater the potential accuracy and detail of the results.

Big Data

Yet breadth alone is not enough, as your Data Set must also be deep, and large enough to provide sufficient saliency. This means that you need to establish multiple sessions and interactions along similar customer journeys / pathways. There has to be a mechanism which maximises, absorbs and organizes all the inputs.

CRM

Indeed, it is the role of the CRM to be the key processor in tabulating and organising all the data. This is about the ’Single Customer View’ - where you can pull up a single file / screen on a customer and view all their interactions and transactions with your business. You need to be able to filter, compare and isolate particular facets of consumer behaviour to keep improving and evolving your business proposition, and taking advantage of the potential opportunities the system helps identify.

Analysis

Analysis is currently split between the various CRM and ’Analyse’ screens in Affino. Yet we are evolving these into more dynamic and fluidly consolidated interfaces. Meaning that it will be easier to identify actions and patterns across the chain of activities - and more easily be able to drill donw into and track results and trends.

Smart Dashboard

The Affino Smart Dashboard will see significant development this year as we bring together most of the key performance indicators onto a single configurable screen. Giving department heads and business leaders - an instant and real-time snapshot of how their business is performing right now, as well as how this compares to historic median and peak activity.

AI

Artificial Intelligence is only ever as good as its input. You need a reasonably sizeable and deep data set to be able to predict behaviour with any degree of accuracy. A combination of pattern recognition and probability modelling will compare customer personal preferences with specific activities, tasks and customer journeys - with a view to predicting customer behaviour and likely outcomes and be able to apply relevant stimuli and influences to achieve desired goals.

Automation

Affino already benefits from the circa 60 Conversion Event Triggers which can be daisy-chained to automatically trigger each other in any sequence. The results of these are and will be fed into and through the CRM to various analysis modules and onto the Smart Dashboard. The next phase of development will involve the evolution of the AI layer - which codifies the data into like pattern groups - which identify common themes and sequences. This all feeds into the longer-term goals of the core Customer Ladder mechanic which was always intended to be imbued with artificial intelligence, but only now has reached the right state of maturity for all this to become possible.

We are still in the process of transitioning the remaining parts of Affino Classic over to Responsive. so this won’t start to fully materialise until the 4th quarter of the year. The incredible thing is that all of this is possible now, it will still though take some quite significant development to be fully realized.