Marketing metrics in action – Case study

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:

Data Warehouse can wait- Start with Data-Marts

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

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.

Read more

Del Taco: Building Customer Loyalty with Respect

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.