It’s always easy to think about marketing metrics but very difficult to implement on the ground. Here’s a great case study by US Bank presented at the recent ANA Marketing Conference last week:
Archive for July, 2008
Very often we find organizations spending a lot of time planning and less time executing. So is the case with long gestation projects like Datawarehouse. Most often, requirements keep changing, business challenges are also dynamic.
Here’s an interesting article on how enterprises must start with data marts and get some quick-wins before they move to large scale DW projects:
An Enterprise Data Warehouse is a long term commitment: There are many imperatives (or foundations), which are key for a Data Warehouse. The examples of these imperatives are foundation or conformed dimensions, fine-grained granular data, comprehensive star-schemas etc…These elements need high level of readiness and investments to build these foundations. These foundations (though great for data marts as well) can be compromised for initial set of Data-marts.
Business Learning- Initial set of data-marts will provide great learning, less on the IT side and more on the business side. Here are the set of learnings from business side:
- Creating business themes
- Building Data-Mart Business Requirements
- Building Dimensional Model
- Testing of Data-Mart
- Taking business decisions around the extraction and transformation
- Generating the information out of the Data-Mart through end-user tools (like reporting and analytics application)
Examples of IT Learnings:
- Extraction, Transformation and Loading design
- Processing Load Management
- Handling Data Explosion (data goes up exponentially as you add sparse fields- where most of the records are blank)
- Change Management (end-to-end impact analysis if you make a change in the Data Mart Model)
Show-case for sponsors: A successful Data-Mart makes sponsorship of a Data Warehouse much easier.
Quick-hit: A Data-mart is a quick hit and gives earlier gratification.
Non-Disruptive: It does not take away the attention of an organization from other big things
27
Jul
08
Bank of the future
How will banks of the future look like?
Finanser directed us a to BBVA, a spanish bank. Take a look:
Personalistion with total customisation, recommendation engines, comparison tools, aggregation, financial widgets, cross-platform and device neutral for both internet and mobile access, and more.
Developed by BBVA and Strands, BBVA Tú cuentas (You count, in Spanish) is an innovative personal finance tool that allows online users to manage their personal finances better, offering friendly analysis tools to better understand spending and savings. A 100% customizable interface, personalized suggestions, and versions for the iPhone, Blackberry and Nokia phones are some of the unique characteristics of BBVA Tú cuentas, being offered to BBVA customers.
BBVA has 4.1 million online customers performing over 1.3 billion annual online transactions. Strands Social Recommender, a key component in the solution, will help BBVA better understand its customers’ needs and behavior, offering them personalized suggestions of financial and non-financial products.
BBVA Tú cuentas is launched today in private beta with the following features:
- Analysis of personal financial information. BBVA Tú cuentas displays a graphical representation of the customers’ financial health, break-down of their income and expenses, as well as their evolution through time. Charts help customers better understand their finances and see whether they have done better or worse than planned over time.
- Categorization of transactions. BBVA Tú cuentas organizes all transactions into a series of categories, and customers can also use personal tags if they prefer them. Having data well organized can help customers make better financial decisions.
- Comparison tools. Customers can tag themselves and BBVA Tú cuentas will compare them to similar customers. Offering meaningful comparisons with similar customers will help people better understand their personal finances and put them into context.
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Business Week has a great article on the approach of Del Taco to customer loyalty. Sometimes building customer loyalty is a simple of affair of getting some basics right :
Del Taco has become the second largest Mexican fast-food chain in the U.S., behind Taco Bell (YUM). How did it manage this? Walk into almost any Del Taco restaurant and you’ll find a counter card promoting the chain’s new shakes (it also offers burgers and fries, in addition to tacos, burritos, and quesadillas). On the back of the card, visible to employees, is a reminder to smile and make eye contact with customers. The card is one example of the simple tools Del Taco President Shirlene Lopez uses to build customer loyalty.
Don’t miss the little things. Effective communication skills played a prominent role in Lopez’s career advancement and she sees such skills as crucial in the way Del Taco builds customer loyalty. “I learned at an early age that customers respond differently based on how you communicate with them. How you greet them and thank them makes all the difference in the world,”
Respect your employees and customers. Respect is a theme for Lopez. It extends to how she believes employees should treat customers as well as how employees should be treated by management. And she thinks eye contact and body language are necessary to convey respect.
Turn transactions into interactions. Lopez believes there is a difference between a satisfied customer and a loyal customer who returns to the same restaurant more than once a week—and tells people about it. According to Lopez, moving beyond merely “satisfied” customers to creating loyal ones is crucial in tough economic times when customers have fewer dollars to spend.
How will financial services firms look in 2010? What will be the key market drivers and operating challenges? A Deloitte Report provides some interesting perspectives:
Key Market Drivers
- New Asset Class will emerge – Capital markets across the world are seeing a centre of gravity shift towards new types of investments like PE and Hedge Funds. Mass Market offerings like MFs will be forced to rethink their products and services.
- Aging Population – The world’s wealthiest generation is quitting and preparing for an indulgent retirement. Very few financial services firms are prepared for this change. Financial institutions of today are largely designed to serve people who accumulate assets and holding assets for the long term. Retirement assets are supposed to reach $ 25 trillion in 2010.
- Payments: P&L Pain or Pride – Banks earn currently 40% of their total revenue from handling payments. Internet-based services continue to eat into this market, cutting banks out of handling and conversion fees.
- Emerging Markets – Opportunities, no guarantees – Emerging markets provide opportunities for growth but they need to adapt the business model to operate profitably.
Key Operating Challenges
- Offshoring - Financial services will offshore their business processes by integrating offshore and onshore operations to create a global delivery model.
- Internal Control - Building the ability to build and consolidate beyond compliance demands.
- Struggle for growth through enhanced customer relationships – There will more service/process innovations rather than product innovations.
When millions of customers contact your contact centre, there is always an opportunity to interact with the customers once their primary request or query is addressed. Very often, this customer interaction may not be used as a “point of leveraging the relationship”. Best-in-class organizations use this opportunity to the best.
According to research estimates:
- Best-in-class companies, share several common characterstics.
- 62% utilize analytics solutions
- 57% of the agents are empowered to decide when is the right time to sell
- 57% have access to sales experts and knowledge for informal training
- Best-in-class companies achieved
- 86% of the companies achieved a sale of $ greater than $20
- 84% of the companies have customer retention of 50% or greater
- 59% have a cost per contact of less than $10
Interestingly, only 40% of the best-in-class companies leverage their cross-selling & up-selling measurements to support their cross-selling & up-selling initiatives!
19
Jul
08
Taming the data beast
In a world where the quantum of data that’s being captured is increasing leaps and bounds, how do companies make sense of these huge piles of data? It is imperative that data must be converted to simple, easy to interpret visual methods at speed.
In this article, Angela writes:
Moore’s Law has driven quantum leaps in the processing power of software and hardware systems. Organizations have become larger and more complex. Demands for up-to-the-minute access to data have intensified.
he most effective way to tame the data beast is through interactive visualization. Spreadsheets and tabular reports are at their limits. Utilizing visual metaphors allows multiple dimensions of the data to be understood at once. In context, it provides a “narrative” for the data. Interactivity allows the user to engage the data in his or her thinking process, which enables a dynamic dialogue with the data.
By empowering knowledge workers with visual tools and hands-on access to data, they can find patterns, distributions, correlations or anomalies across multiple data types. Users can select data elements, filters, highlighting and display options to change data perspectives – from high-level overviews down to the lowest levels of detail. The visual cues inherent in the software enable a deep exploration and understanding of the data set at hand.
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It’s not often uncommon when clients tell us that customers are increasingly not filling-up application/enrollment and feedback forms completely, data about their customers & their profiles are not updated and also information about their behaviour is increasingly becoming scarce & difficult to get, how do companies handle an market environment like this?
We think organizations have to change way they capture or mine data. They need to look at where else can they ‘dialog’ with these customers – Twitter, Facebook, Google Chat etc.? How often have you seen companies even capture such” Dialog Points” for a possible “information opportunity”?
There is an interesting point of view on the same on this issue. Take a look:
To stay on top of purchase trends or address dissatisfactions, marketing teams often administer surveys and comb through hundreds of thousands of responses to find needles of profundity in the customer service haystack. In reality, if today’s consumer has a gripe or suggestion, he or she no longer fills out a comment card or a survey. Instead, the customer takes it to the keyboard and posts comments online for the whole world to read. Given the influence of word of mouth (or more appropriately, word of “blog”), your business will feel the direct effects of online reviews – positively or negatively.
According to a 2007 Deloitte & Touche study, more than eight in 10 (82 percent) of consumers said their purchasing decisions have been directly influenced by online reviews.1 With the advent of the blogosphere and social-media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, there are more opportunities for customers to voice their opinions, and the circle of influence has grown much wider. Monitoring for these comments must be a core part of your business.
Organizations have a unique opportunity to connect with their customers just by letting them know they are being heard. JetBlue Airways created a Twitter account after learning customers were using this platform to voice their frustrations. Now, Twitter has become a key customer service portal where the airline offers discounts and responds to flyers in real time. Using Twitter, JetBlue has turned around its negative public perception, even in a struggling aviation market.
The Web’s reach is boundless and social-media text is quite unstructured making it impossible for a typical search to uncover everything of relevance. So, how can marketers and executives sift through all of the social-media noise – the ruminations, misfindings and the insignificant rants – to find the true opinions and reviews about their brands?
The answer is semantic search and analysis. Semantic search provides early identification of consumer concerns, suggestions, likes and dislikes and purchasing trends. It uncovers this information from the most unstructured corners of the Web. The retrieval of such information is not limited to recognizing key words as typical Web searches do. Instead, it uncovers the meaning the words express in their proper context and accepted meaning no matter the number (singular or plural), gender (masculine or feminine), verb tense (past, present or future) or mode (indicative or imperative).
Companies always talk about customer engagement but many a times there is always a gap between planning & execution. What really differentiates the best from the not so good are the ones that identify the key levers and practice this consistently. Allegiance shares some best practices on customer engagement:
It is important to be able to quantify engagement for a number of reasons. Most importantly is by understanding where you stand with your customers—i.e. how many are engaged, disengaged or on the fence (swing)—you will be able to focus your efforts on developing products, services and programs that will help move people off the fence into your engaged customer group or possibly reverse negative perceptions of disengaged customers and help them become loyal customers.
Four primary economic measurements of engaged customers are:
- Share of wallet—Engaged people buy more products/services
- Positive referral—Engaged customers convert potential customers to switch
- Churn—Engaged people stay longer
- Feedback Response—Engaged people give more feedback, which in turn gives you the opportunity to address issues and concerns and preserve potentially lost revenue
Adage provides some fine point of view on how loyalty can support business in a recessionary or slow growth economy – by targeting loyal customers and customizing offers:
As a 15-year employee of Hilton Hotels, Adam Burke, senior VP-customer loyalty, has had to contend with the problems caused by economic slowdowns and recessions.
“Like a lot of people in the [hospitality] industry, we’re starting to see some slowing,” Mr. Burke said. “Our Honors members tend to be the group that buoys us through a downturn. They are the core audience and tend to stay loyal and sustain the business especially through those downturns.”
Hilton’s Mr. Burke said that’s why the company focuses on customizing its offers. “We’re in an environment where we have, at any given time, as many as 100 offers in market being personalized on individual customer preferences. It’s become a very cost-effective way to run the business and generated a ton of business for the hotels.”
Dawn Marie, head of retail practice at Rapp Collins, said “”It’s important for us to help our clients understand that loyalty is not a plastic card. It’s about creating experiences and recognition with programs versus just making it a plastic card inside a wallet. That’s what is next for loyalty.”
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