Brandon Purcell

This week, YouTube turned to Facebook and said, “Hold my beer.” Yesterday, after intense pressure, the platform decided to demonetize channels that promote hate speech and discrimination. And in a terrifying story on Monday, The New York Times reported that YouTube’s recommendation engine surfaces videos of partially clothed children to viewers who’ve watched similar videos […]

As companies strive to improve customer experience through better customer and employee engagement, they inevitably face the problem of scalability. How can we provide a seamless, convenient, and consistent experience to all our customers? And how can we best equip our employees to do so, as well? The technologies in our recently published “The Forrester […]

With millions of rabid fans tuning in and turning out to watch these spectacles unfold in real time, customer insights pros are met with a tremendous opportunity to create meaningful moments of engagement for their fans using data and analytics.

In the world of customer analytics, soaring solos only get you so far. Delivering harmonious customer experiences across the customer life cycle requires careful collaboration across different business functions.

Today, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is suing Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act. It accuses the tech giant of “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination” by allowing advertisers to block real estate ads from race, religion, country of birth, and other protected characteristics. Advertisers could effectively red-line by […]

Sports: the games we know and love. We love to play and watch these games so much, in fact, that in the US, there are only two days during the year when the four major pro sports leagues aren’t playing a game (i.e., MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL).[i] One of the most anticipated games in […]

AWS just announced Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to help companies create training data sets for machine learning. This is a powerful new service for folks who have access to lots of data that hasn’t been consistently annotated. In the past, humans would have to label a massive corpus of images or frames within video to […]

In about a month, I will have the honor of presenting my research on “The Ethics Of AI: How To Avoid Harmful Bias And Discrimination” to attendees at CX Europe 2018. The event will take place in London on November 13 and 14 and will feature several of my esteemed analyst colleagues, as well as […]

You’ve been sold on the value of data and analytics: If you embed data and analytics across your business, you will make better decisions to grow customer lifetime value, increase operational efficiencies, and differentiate from the competition. It just makes sense. But have you been able to actually do it, at scale, across your organization? […]

I just had the pleasure of attending a Forrester Leadership Boards workshop followed by our Consumer Marketing Forum in New York City.  As usual, data challenges remain top of mind for most marketers – siloed data, dirty data, inaccessible data… the usual suspects.  However, there was also a data manifestation of an age old organizational […]

It seems that almost every week these days, there is a news item about the dangerous potential for artificial intelligence to discriminate against groups of people.  Earlier this week, a presentation at the Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) conference on an AI system trained to help the LAPD classify crimes as gang violence had […]

With the passing of the autumnal equinox, it’s time to rake leaves, sip pumpkin spiced lattes, and take stock of the summer’s activities.  For most CI pros, this summer was spent wrangling and analyzing customer data for insights- hopefully with some much-needed R&R sprinkled in.  For me, this summer was also busy and productive resulting […]

These days it seems like you can't open a newspaper (ok, web browser) without coming across an article on artificial intelligence. Well publicized breakthroughs like Google AlphaGo's unprecedented victories over human Go champions have heralded the promise of a new golden age for AI. Add to that the personification of personal assistants in Apple's Siri and […]

The first U.S. presidential debate was the most watched in history, with 84 million people tuning in.  Sure, many of us wanted to educate ourselves before practicing our solemn duty as democratic citizens in November.  However, many of us also didn’t want to miss out on what (hopefully) promised to be a once in a […]

Customer insights professionals consistently ask me what other companies are doing to turn their customer data into actionable insights.  To answer this question, Forrester partnered with Burtch Works, an analytics executive recruitment agency, to survey customer analytics and measurement professionals about their current efforts.  I’m quite thrilled to share the results in my State of […]

The primary objective of customer analytics is to transform data into valuable insights that impact organizational goals.  With an abundance of organizational goals, petabytes of data at their disposal, and a whole slew of potential techniques for analyzing that data, customer insights professionals often (quite ironically) find themselves in a state of analysis paralysis. Forrester’s […]

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a teleconference highlighting IBM Watson’s success stories over the past year.  Most of them are under NDA, so I can’t go into the details, but I will say they covered an incredibly broad range of use cases.  One use case that I was hoping they would cover […]

We have all this valuable data about our customers, but we need to make better use of it. This is the most common theme I hear on inquiry calls, at conferences, and in advisory sessions.  At this point, companies are fully aware that their data contains enormous value.  In fact, I like to think that […]

Greetings!  My name is Brandon Purcell and I am the new Senior Analyst serving Customer Insights professionals at Forrester.  I will cover customer analytics which uses advanced analytics to analyze customer data to optimize customer-focused programs and initiatives to drive acquisition, retention, cross-sell/upsell, loyalty, personalization, and contextual marketing. I am a recovering customer analytics practitioner and […]