Loose Cannon: And How Do YOU Feel About This?
Garbage in, garbage out: When schizophrenic data goes into e-commerce analytics models, is it any wonder that number crunchers charged with building those models are being driven to madness?
The psychiatric community is adding “Analyst’s Twitch” to the more commonly known psychological ailments. This condition occurs among e-commerce data modelers tasked with building a coherent consumer profile out of someone who has included a set of silver fish knives, three RAM cards, a dozen Oriental tiger lily bulbs, slipcovers for a La-Z-Boy recliner, and a deck of tarot cards designed by Salvador Dali in his shopping basket.
Take a moment to pity the data analyst charged predicting the next likely purchase based on the above transaction information. Some of those purchases are likely gift items, but which ones?
The remedy for this is simple, cheaper than Prozac, and will likely prevent more nervous breakdowns. (I’m extrapolating here: While I have not actually come across accounts of such happenings, I recently saw a numbers wonk from a very large online retail site violently pound a bar top after imbibing several shots of Wild Turkey. Of course, he could have been swatting at a cockroach. It was dark.)
E-commerce folk, to save an analyst – and boost the efficacy of your models – consider including a “this item is a present” button or tick box to your checkout pages.
Now, the mantra for order forms is “simplify, simplify, simplify.” But by adding this button, e-commerce firms will have much more reliable data regarding which items are and are not appropriate to include in an individual’s profile.
Consumers won’t balk at taking this extra step if language along the lines of “We want to provide you with discounts and special offers that would be most appealing to you” appears alongside the button. Sites wanting to go further can offer customers a chance to build profiles for specific gift recipients.
To a certain extent, analyzing differences in “bill to” and “ship to” locations already addresses this concern. But there is a world of difference in information attained through inference – gifts can be shipped to the purchaser for later distribution – and that obtained through direct answers to specific questions.
All right, Analyst’s Twitch may not be a recognized condition within the psychoanalytic community (yet). But pathological shyness on the part of marketers, when it comes to asking for a tiny bit of information that could yield important insight, is. And it’s very treatable.
To indicate whether this theory is crazy or not, please contact [email protected]
