Customer-facing analytics – building relevance to business

DM Direct has interesting article on how now it is important to take data, information & analytics from back-office to front-office if it has make business impact & drive ROI. At Cequity, we have been constantly talking to business leaders in different forums and also advising our clients that it is imperative to find methods to convert data into action in real-time. Else, given the huge data decay that happen over a period of time, one always tends to use data to analyze the past rather than influence the future or proactively manage the present. This is really where we believe enterprises must build competitive advantage with data analytics and data-driven marketing.

Take a look at  what the DM Direct article has to say about this:

We’ve all been through it. After a frustrating attempt to figure out a discrepancy in your phone bill online, you finally give up and call the company. After being transferred twice and speaking to three people who each had to validate your information and ask what the problem was the problem of customer-facing analytics takes on real meaning.

Improving Phone Interactions

Most people who call into customer service are already irritated. The best way to transform an unhappy customer into a happy one is to address his or her problems quickly, interact with the customer on a personal level, listen to (and document) their issues and provide information about what will happen next. A customer service representative armed with information can transform a bad situation into a memorable, positive experience.

For those instances when a customer calls into an organization for reasons other than a problem – for example to start a new service – customer-facing analytics provide the customer service representative the ability to capture information about a prospective client and tailor offerings to the individual’s needs. For example, a phone company can sign up a family for the most cost-effective plan. Analytics provide the ability to cross-sell and upsell based on consumer patterns, versus promoting a cookie-cutter offering for all customers and making them feel that they’re just another checkbook.

Personal Touch

In-person encounters with customers provide the opportunity to make a lasting impression. Any employee can be a company advocate in your campaign to create customer satisfaction, but one behind a computer screen can be a particularly valuable asset. In addition to providing good service, a customer service representative can ask better questions to serve a customer, provide insights into products that may interest the consumer and appear more knowledgeable.

As analytics improve, it’s astonishing how good computers have become at “guessing” what you’d like. Netflix predicts what movies a viewer will enjoy based how the viewer has rated other movies in the past. Through the simple application of customer analytics, the Netflix Web site provides a valuable recommendation service. Customers expect this level of service, and it’s becoming commonplace on successful businesses’ Web sites.

Loyalty data translates in better marketing

According to a Nielsen report on consumer insights, stronger and longer-lasting customer relationships can be achieved by a sound analysis of shopping behaviour, leading to targeted marketing programmes.

At Cequity, our belief is that loyalty marketers don’t really use their loyalty marketing data effectively for creating tangible business impact. Our belief is that loyalty data has to be effectively used in real-time(week after week in grocery retail or month after month in lifestyle, CD/IT retail) in target marketing campaigns to build ” value perception” & ” personalized service/rewards privileges” amongst loyal customers.

Take a look at what the Nielsen Report has to say:

Foundations of loyalty
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, companies that use their loyalty programmes to establish a deeper relationship with their customers are better positioned to prosper. Two foundational factors are especially important within any loyalty scheme:

1. Maintaining good customer data with insights, which can be easily distributed throughout the organisation for decision-making;
2. Developing a business culture that constantly looks for ways to improve programmes that benefit customers by applying shopper insights.

Creating a process for gathering insights, testing programmes and learning about customer response is important. While a few interesting facts about a cardholder’s household composition might come from the initial card application, such information and even deeper insights may also be derived by capturing sales history and assessing information about customers from transactional-level purchase data.

Sales data not only tells an analyst about additional family members in a cardholder’s household, but it also identifies opportunities to target the household more uniquely through a better understanding of preferences for specific categories, products and brands to satisfy the special needs of a child or any other household member.

Analytical models
Increasingly-sophisticated models also enable analysts to understand why customers shop, how they shop, what they buy and how sensitive they are to various price structures. If properly collected and assessed, sales data can point out everything from pets in the home to family health and nutrition needs. Analysis of the data becomes one way to answer those burning business questions:
· What do customers want?
· How can I keep them shopping in my stores?
· What opportunities exist to increase sales?

The data, analysis, and decision-making are only as good as the commitment by business leaders to continuously apply the insights to developing programmes that positively impact customer behaviour. This kind of transformational change and the impact it has on the enterprise takes time. If leadership embraces the use and application of customer data, the business will follow. Even then, the business must adapt in other ways.

Structural changes needed
Organisational and structural changes are required to re-align goals and incentives or develop planning processes that place a focus on the customer. The end result, however, works. Nielsen Loyalty has witnessed established retailer programmes achieve:

• Sales effect increases of 1% to 5% in same store sales;
• Loyal customer basket sales increases of 5% and 9%;
• New customer retention rate increases from 20% to 40%;
• Supplier funding for insight and communications rises from 0.05% to 0.1% of sales;
• Promotional budget savings from 20% to 40%;
• At least 75% of sales tracked at customer-item level.

Every aspect of a retail business and the interaction with supplier partners must embrace the needed changes for these levels of success to occur. It does not happen quickly, but the sooner the shift in focus occurs, the sooner all parties can begin trialling new solutions.

A good example
One North American retailer, well known for rewarding it best “Platinum Fans” customers, wanted to use its Loyalty card programme to further build customer affinity and grow sales. By all accounts, this grocery chain has earned some measure of success-achieving over 85% of sales on card by reinforcing a message of customer value, targeted offers, and special services. These loyal customers received periodic special in-store gift cards and coupons presented to them directly by the store manager for maintaining high loyalty thresholds.

Gearing-up for Mobile Number Portability(MNP)

In India, yesterday the Government has announced the deadline & a roadmap for Mobile Number Portability ( MNP). Cequity believes this is going to be an important challenge for telecom operators in India and there is a need for huge customer retention & targeted marketing efforts in gearing-up to this environment, as this is just a few months away.

Here’s is how South African Mobile operators have approached this challenge:

The introduction of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) enabled South African mobile phone service customers to retain their phone number when changing mobile service provider, this was expected to test customer loyalty and trigger far higher levels of churn, as it did in other countries that have already introduced number portability. Analysts believed that more than one-quarter of consumers (a predicted 27%) will change networks within one year of the service becoming available, and such predictions have ensured that customer retention is now firmly at the top of the agenda for the country’s mobile operators.

What drives churn?
Although particularly rife in fiercely competitive industries such as telecoms, customer churn is a significant problem that spares very few companies. The mobile communications industry in particular is largely product driven and price conscious – two traditionally strong reasons for runaway customer churn. But Moodley suggests that the main driver of churn may actually be service delivery, both in terms of customer service and network performance.

“Although it might appear otherwise, with price conscious customers clamouring for the latest and greatest handsets, these reasons tend to cancel themselves out in the age of hyper-consumerism,” said Moodley. “And products and service packages are quickly replicated by the competition anyway, so there is no real, enduring advantage from either.”

“The higher rates of churn will predominantly be from customers with existing complaints or reasons for wanting to move, simply taking advantage of MNP.”

Predictive modelling techniques based on empirical evidence and analytics can help find churn patterns. By combining a variety of mathematical techniques, including artificial neural networks, statistical regression, and decision trees, many SA mobile operators determine the propensity of any individual customer to cease doing business with a company within a given time period.

The results are often surprising: “You might be under the impression that customers want the latest phones or trendier outlets, but – for example – a large number of those leaving the network may have experienced a considerable number of dropped calls in the past six months.”

Analytical customer management strategies can certainly be helpful for mobile phone network operators because they have unusually rich transactional data, which allows very specific patterns and results to be identified.

Cequity View Point: Collaborative & iterative approach is the need of the hour

Continuous, easy & quick analysis will be very useful and to maximize the efforts of marketing, customer service, and other departments, data analysis has to work in a synergistic manner. Analytical insights must be effectively used by marketers to have an interactive “dialog” with their transactional data–and also allow a cross-functional team to review the latest data and create meaningful interactions with customers that are most at risk at any given time.

Better access to and understanding of customer data will help circle heads take informed decisions and help build better customer relationships. Faster cycle times can accelerate deeper understanding and improve time-to-market–both will be key to success in an increasingly competitive marketplace like India.

The key to effectively combating number portability related churn is a flexible and iterative approach.

Differentiating a bank’s services

Ron Shevlin has a very good post on the challenges banks face on differentiating their services. At Cequity, we do believe that “customization of services” is really the future of bank branding. Banks & Financial services business need to understand customer transactional behaviour a lot more and tailor-make their services to customers according to their needs at that time. Differentiation by understanding “the pattern behind transactions” is going to  become a huge competitive advantage for banks & financial services businesses in the future – which is starting now!

Take a look at what Ron has to say:

Financial services branding is a hot topic these days, from releases of (methodologically suspect) brand rankings, to a number of blog posts. Stealing Share published a study recently, and had this to say about bank brands:

“The major banks remain undifferentiated and deliver little to no brand meaning. What banks need is a new brand promise, one that is a reflection of who the target audience is.”

In the future, banks will go down one of the following three branding paths:

1) Specialist. The brand message for firms going down this path will be “We do [fill-in-the-blank] — and only [fill-in-the-blank].” Fill-in-the-bank might be a specific product or service, or perhaps “serve” a specific segment of the market.

Rationale: The financial supermarket concept has never worked, and never will. Consumers have never wanted a one-stop shop, and many never will. Self-directed consumers who know what they want, are willing to put in the effort to manage their finances — and multiple financial providers — will place a value on firms that specialize in narrow product areas, services, or their particular segment.

2) Trusted, objective advisor. The brand message for banks on this path is: “We do right’s for you — not us.” Think Miracle On 34th Street with Santa sending customers to other stores because it’s right for them. Sound crazy? Sure it does. But this is true differentiation — and will plenty of traffic in the door and on the site. It’s working for Progressive Insurance.

Rationale: There’s a segment of consumers — they tend to be younger, less affluent, less highly educated — that need advice and guidance on how to manage their financial lives and how to make smart decisions. Trusted advice is easy to get when you have $10 million in the bank (which is funny to say, because the people who have $10 million usually don’t keep it with a bank). Trusted, objective advice — regarding both sides of the balance sheet (assets and liabilities) — is an unment need among many consumers.

3) Operational excellence. The brand tagline for firms on this track is “We don’t screw up — ever. And if we do, we’ll fix it so fast you won’t even know it happened.” (I’m sure the copywriters will come up with more appropriate language).

Rationale: Relatively affluent, highly educated consumers value this more than anything else. When my bank screws up a $50 charge, it can only make me wonder: “If you can’t keep track of $50, how can you expect me to invest $500k with you?