Closed loop business intelligence

Business intelligence captures a wealth of information about the customers that visit, and more importantly, what they purchase from your site. Knowing your customers based on this information is important as it allows you to make more intelligent decisions about the marketing and merchandising efforts you undertake. For instance, based on the knowledge of who is buying a certain product, you might decide that it's worthwhile to try to up-sell some accessory to those people that have already purchased the product. You might also decide to create an e-mail activity advertising this product to customers that have not yet purchased the product. In both cases, targeting the new marketing message is relatively simple, as a result of the given purchase conditions. The problem is that there are probably numerous purchasing trends that exist among your customers that are not as readily apparent.

The process of creating merchandising and marketing materials, customers shopping the site with these new materials, collecting data, and then feeding this information back into the future marketing and merchandising efforts creates a loop. Until this version of WebSphere Commerce, getting usable data from this loop, and using it in future marketing and merchandising efforts was a manual task.

Closed loop business intelligence brings the power of data mining to WebSphere Commerce using WebSphere Commerce Analyzer. This feature takes your operational data on a regular basis, performs a set of analysis, and suggests target customer profiles based on results of the data. While the data mining results themselves require the skills of a qualified Database Administrator, the creation of the new customer profiles is facilitated by the inclusion of a new user interface panel in the Customer Profile wizard.