Brandon Purcell

Principal Analyst Serving Customer Insights Professionals

Brandon serves Customer Insights Professionals, covering customer analytics and artificial intelligence. His work helps organizations derive meaningful insights from customer data to attract and retain customers, increase customer loyalty and profitability, and inform product development and service delivery. His research agenda includes customer analytics and artificial intelligence strategy, innovation and best practices, skill development, and vendor evaluation.

Previous Work Experience

Prior to joining Forrester, Brandon led the data science team at a boutique consulting firm, helping marketers derive actionable insights from their customer and marketing data. As a data scientist, Brandon employed advanced customer analytics techniques such as predictive modeling and text analytics to address his clients’ business challenges. His engagements included helping a large retail bank develop a voice-of-the-customer program and creating a patented predictive location algorithm using geospatial data from mobile devices. His extensive analyses of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Consumer Complaint Database have been featured in Bloomberg, Forbes, and The Financial Brand.

Brandon spent many years as a financial specialist on the floors of the American Stock Exchange and Chicago Board Options Exchange. He also spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in the Republic of Benin in West Africa.

Education

Brandon holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley and a B.A. in English and creative writing from Dartmouth College.

Print Bio

Brandon Purcell

Principal Analyst Serving Customer Insights Professionals

Previous Work Experience

Education

Brandon holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley and a B.A. in English and creative writing from Dartmouth College.

Research Coverage

Brandon Purcell's Research

Most RecentMost Popular

For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: Turn Data Into Insights With Customer Analytics

Executive Overview: The Customer Analytics Playbook

February 1, 2019Brandon Purcell, Emily Miller

The scale and diversity of customer data provide rich new sources of insight that let firms engage with customers in new ways and enable the digital disruption of entire industries. Today's customer analytics practitioners are no longer data geeks feeding the marketing funnel — they provide insights across the customer life cycle. CI pros can use customer analytics to extend their value and become strategic business partners. Forrester's customer analytics playbook lays out the best practices, strategies, and technologies that make analytics a core customer insights capability. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: How Analytics Drives Customer Life-Cycle Management

Vision: The Customer Analytics Playbook

February 1, 2019Brandon Purcell

With the growing importance of customer insights (CI) in organizations, the role of analytics to extract insight and embed it back into organizational processes is at the forefront of business transformation. Yet marketers predominantly enable measurement and analytics infrastructure to serve the needs of customer acquisition, with a limited view of the entire customer life cycle. CI pros should deploy analytical techniques across the customer life cycle to grow existing customer relationships and provide insight into future behavior. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Emerging Technology Spotlight: Computer Vision

Computer Vision Gives Machines The Gift Of Sight

December 10, 2018Brandon Purcell, Kjell Carlsson, Ph.D.

Thanks to massive training data sets, deep neural networks, and graphics processing units (GPUs), computers can now accurately identify objects and features in images and video. CIOs and business technology leaders should read this report to understand how they can leverage computer vision for security, social media monitoring, marketing asset management, manufacturing, and myriad other use cases involving the classification of unstructured image data.
For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: The State Of Customer Analytics 2018

Benchmarks: The Customer Analytics Playbook

December 4, 2018Brandon Purcell, Emily Miller

To assess the state of analytics adoption, including goals, challenges, and analytics sophistication, Forrester and Burtch Works fielded an online survey to 144 North American analytics and measurement pros. In this report, we give customer insights (CI) pros key benchmarks to plan their customer analytics capability. Compared with our 2017 benchmarks, we see firms adopting more predictive analytics techniques for deeper customer understanding. We also uncovered three levels of analytics sophistication — leaders, followers, and laggards — and continue to see increasing analytics maturity.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Predictions 2019: Artificial Intelligence

No Pain, No Gain With Enterprise AI

November 6, 2018 Michele Goetz, Brandon Purcell, Craig Le Clair, Diego Lo Giudice, Mike Gualtieri

Your enterprise AI journey is going to be a rollercoaster. You want immediate rewards from AI but realize the risks. You will overcome your cautious cynicism by overplanning. You'll dive in anyway and dabble. You'll make rookie mistakes. You will think of quitting. But you'll strive on to reap tangible benefits and bragging rights. In the last couple of years, we've seen firms learn to fail fast with AI initiatives, but 2019 will bring a more refined approach to going after the AI opportunity. CIOs: Read the five predictions that will guide your data, talent, automation, governance, and machine learning (ML) decisions.

For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: How Analytics Drives Customer Life-Cycle Management

Vision: The Customer Analytics Playbook

February 1, 2019Brandon Purcell

With the growing importance of customer insights (CI) in organizations, the role of analytics to extract insight and embed it back into organizational processes is at the forefront of business transformation. Yet marketers predominantly enable measurement and analytics infrastructure to serve the needs of customer acquisition, with a limited view of the entire customer life cycle. CI pros should deploy analytical techniques across the customer life cycle to grow existing customer relationships and provide insight into future behavior. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: Turn Data Into Insights With Customer Analytics

Executive Overview: The Customer Analytics Playbook

February 1, 2019Brandon Purcell, Emily Miller

The scale and diversity of customer data provide rich new sources of insight that let firms engage with customers in new ways and enable the digital disruption of entire industries. Today's customer analytics practitioners are no longer data geeks feeding the marketing funnel — they provide insights across the customer life cycle. CI pros can use customer analytics to extend their value and become strategic business partners. Forrester's customer analytics playbook lays out the best practices, strategies, and technologies that make analytics a core customer insights capability. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: Deciphering A Fragmented Customer Analytics Ecosystem

February 24, 2016 Srividya Sridharan, Brandon Purcell

With the increased focus on insights-driven marketing, few firms have the budgets, technology capabilities, or analytical skills to advance their analytics agendas internally, and they frequently turn to extended analytics ecosystems for guidance. Firms must navigate a complex vendor marketplace of analytics technology, software, and service providers. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. It outlines categories of customer analytics vendors and breaks down the capabilities of the players in this ecosystem. In this updated report, we revised vendor examples to reflect acquisitions and market shifts.
For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: It's Time To Raise The Bar With Analytics

Assessment: The Customer Analytics Playbook

January 19, 2018Brandon Purcell

Customer analytics powers customer obsession by helping insights-driven businesses understand their customers and drive growth. While advanced statistical techniques form the backbone of customer analytics, the foundation of enterprise success comes from maturity in six mission-critical components: strategy, structure, data, analytics and measurement, process, and technology. This report provides a self-assessment to help customer insights (CI) professionals determine where they fall in Forrester's customer analytics maturity model. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: TechRadar™: Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Q1 2017

AI Technologies Will Augment Your Enterprise Applications, Amplify Your Intelligence, And Unburden Your Employees

January 18, 2017Rowan Curran, Brandon Purcell

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an old idea. But a broad set of important technologies is emerging, which big data, cloud storage, and compute have enabled. AI is a liberatory technology at its core, and businesses that integrate it will free workers to become more innovative, creative, and adaptive than ever before. But these technologies are still in early stages. In this report, we examine 13 of the more important technologies for enterprises and application development and delivery (AD&D) pros to consider integrating into apps and business processes to support human decision-making.