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 CIO Professionals

REPORT: Emerging Technology Spotlight: Natural Language Generation

Natural Language Generation Gives Human-Computer Interfaces The Gift Of Gab

October 9, 2018Brandon Purcell, Boris Evelson

Companies are using natural language generation (NLG) to create written reports, explain visualizations in business intelligence (BI) tools, and develop chatbots and voice assistants that interact with customers. CIOs and business technology leaders should read this report to learn more about how NLG is developing artificially intelligent systems that "speak" to users.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Emerging Technology Spotlight: Deep Learning

Deep Learning Unlocks The Value Of New Use Cases

October 1, 2018Brandon Purcell, Mike Gualtieri

Much of today's interest in artificial intelligence (AI) comes from advances in deep learning, a branch of machine learning that analyzes data using neural networks. Deep learning is particularly adept at analyzing images, video, and natural language text. This report helps CIOs and business technology leaders understand the potential of deep learning for enterprise applications.
For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Tech Tide™: Artificial Intelligence For Business Insights, Q3 2018

Road Map: The Customer Analytics Playbook

September 28, 2018Brandon Purcell

AI technologies are evolving fast and growing increasingly critical to firms' ability to win, serve, and retain customers. The imperative exists for these firms not to just adopt a singular AI tech but rather to have access to an arsenal of AI tech that will improve their ability to generate and act on critical business insights. This Forrester Tech Tide™ report presents an analysis of the maturity and business value of the 14 technology categories that support business intelligence (BI). Customer insights (CI) pros should read this report to shape their firm's investment in these technologies.
For Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: Deep Learning: The Start Of An AI Revolution For Customer Insights Professionals

Continuous Improvement: The Customer Analytics Playbook

September 6, 2018Brandon Purcell, Mike Gualtieri, Diego Lo Giudice

Deep learning is the start of a revolution. A revolution because it allows enterprises to create predictive models with uncanny accuracy on image, voice, and natural language data that was previously impossible to analyze. A revolution because the internet giants have all embraced it as a core part of their go-forward AI strategy. And, finally, a revolution because it has only just begun, but over the next three to five years it will disrupt customer insights (CI) pros in their mission to understand their customers. 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: Deep Learning: An AI Revolution Started For Courageous Enterprises

AD&D Pros Can Develop Applications That Can See, Understand, Talk, And Learn

September 5, 2018 Mike Gualtieri, Diego Lo Giudice, Brandon Purcell

Deep learning is a revolution started. A revolution because it allows enterprises to create predictive models with uncanny accuracy on previously hard-to-analyze data such as images, voice, and natural language. A revolution because the internet giants have all embraced deep learning as their go-forward AI strategy. And, finally, a revolution because it has only just begun. Once a revolution gets big enough, it disrupts. That's the opportunity for application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals who build enterprise and customer applications. 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

November 2, 2017Brandon Purcell, Srividya Sridharan

With the growing importance of customer insights in organizations, the role of analytics to extract insight and embed it back into organizational processes is at the forefront of business transformation. However, marketers predominantly enable measurement and analytics infrastructure to serve the needs of customer acquisition, with a limited view toward the entire customer life cycle. Forrester recommends that CI pros deploy various 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

August 15, 2017Brandon Purcell

The scale and diversity of customer data provide rich new sources of insight, letting 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 are providing 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 Customer Insights Professionals

REPORT: TechRadar™: Customer Analytics Methods, Q2 2016

April 5, 2016 Srividya Sridharan, Brandon Purcell

Forrester has identified 15 key customer analytics methods that customer insights (CI) professionals must master. CI professionals are faced with tough decisions about which combination of methods will have the biggest impact on marketing and customer experience goals. And new techniques continue to emerge as the complexity of customer data increases. This report uses Forrester's TechRadar™ methodology to identify and analyze the current and future prospects of a broad range of statistical methods and predictive analytics techniques. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.