Analytics critical to business during recession

BANGALORE, INDIA: The current global recession is weakening both consumer confidence and spending. Consumers, the world over, are rationalizing purchases and redefining value. Brand vs Utility is becoming a topical debate in the customers' mind.

Understanding and retaining customers is critical during recession for companies in the consumer goods, automobile and pharma sectors. How does one do that? “The answer lies in Analytics,” says Palanivel Kuppusamy, chairman and CEO, Dexterity. 

“Analytics  is critical to business during recession. Companies have all the data they need to make the right business decisions. Yet, at times, they seek answers from outside. What they have to do is apply Analytics to the data that they have knowingly and unknowingly accumulated over the years, study the patterns and make inferences,” he explains.

How does Analytics help?

It helps the marketing team deliver more sales, instead of simply working harder. To help companies understand their consumers better, Dexterity, leader in Marketing and Customer Informatics (MCI), has come up with a host of Customer Analytics solutions. The company provides targeted business solutions for market research (MR), marketing intelligence and customer intelligence. 

“As a company we are focused in helping the demand side of business processes of an organisation. We primarily help the marketing  functions, sales functions and the customer relationship management functions of large enterprises,” he says. “We work with large marketing research companies, completely addressing their needs in the market research operations, thereby helping them deliver insights to their enterprise customers who continuously listen to the market and customers to drive their decisions and strategies.” 

“The advantage Dexterity has amidst other market research organisations is that we offer the value proposition of global sourcing by considerably bringing the costs down. We also leverage technology effectively by adding the capability on top of the process. Hence this business model becomes more attractive for companies to reach out to their customers,” says Kuppusamy. 

“We tell our customers, 'You can do more of these data collection at a reasonably good cost'. This seems to be a good message in this market condition,” he adds.

”In most situations,  budget for market research is not instantly approved by the management because they don't see an immediate ROI. Marketing costs are always seen as a long term thing, an area where their ROI cannot be calculated,” he notes.

MR Anywhere

MR Anywhere is an on-demand, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) application from Dexterity that lets you handle various aspects of the market research process. It is a new generation On-demand Fieldwork solution. 

Market researchers look for lowering costs, shortening research cycle, improving automation and enhancing reach and convenience. MR Anywhere brings together the key components of fieldwork within a collaborative technology platform. With a pay-as-you-go pricing model, it offers complete information security and,  data and information integration across tools.

“With our technology platform like MR Anywhere, which latches upon to global sourcing, one can potentially do double the work at the same budget. Our approach is to eliminate costs in the market research operation and add value,” explains Kuppusamy.

Explaining further, he adds, “Even non-research users can come on to the MR Anywhere platform and post their requirements and see that it is taken up and executed by the service bureau in the other part of the world.”

Dexterity has close to 18 customers globally jumping on to this platform. Besides customers using this on an ad hoc basis, the company has got two customers who have bought the enterprise version of MR Anywhere to use it as their internal platform where they will do part of the work with their internal service bureau and part of  it done by Dexterity's service bureau.

MI and CI solutions

“Enterprises are collecting enormous volumes of data. Month on month they are spending lot of money in acquiring them. But obviously one of the pain points is that they have not been effectively using the data thus collected,” says Kuppusamy. 

“In the current situation, the top management is questioning the spending from MI/CI people.  This puts them to a situation where they should try to do more with the data they are accumulating. In that context, we find our MI and CI services to be pertinent to them where we can help them put their multiple data together and generate the required insights,” he adds.

Customer Analytics in India

“We see that there is a  good level of maturity. We are yet to have a commercial case to say that people are willing to spend in India. The demand is actually converted into business only with the need and the amount of spending,” says Kuppusamy.

Presently, Dexterity is in talks with two automobile companies and one large retail mart in India who are interested to use analytics for their campaign operations.