A Campaign Management Case Study

Credit Union takes advantage of member data to improve campaign effectiveness.
by Robin Way on October 17, 2017

Businesses across the country are turning to data to gain a competitive advantage and improve profitability. But their success hinges on the ability to gain insights from that data – and from those insights, the ability to implement profitable change both strategically and technically across their organization.  The case of the credit union described below is the perfect example of data being collected, but not effectively utilized.

Challenge: The marketing division of this credit union had been wholly dependent on a marketing agency to run their campaigns, which as a result tended to be plain vanilla and treated most members as if their relationship with the credit unions were all equivalent. The credit union wanted to take advantage of their member data warehouse in segmenting and targeting campaigns, and in attributing responses to those campaigns in future efforts.

Solution: Corios automated the production of marketing campaigns for our client using their enterprise data warehouse as the primary data source augmented with data tables supplied by external data source providers, such as Experian. We replicated many of their campaigns in the new platform, trained them how to replicate and build new campaigns, how to modernize their campaigns using the new tool, and taught them how to use test-and-learn and analytics in their targeting strategy.

Result:This increased credit union usage by members, strengthen and deepen member access, provided real-time access to data, and increased cross-sell retention.

 

For analytics to be truly powerful, they must do more than simply process large amounts of data using a static set of statistical techniques. At Corios, we believe that powerful analytics should create new insights to be implemented and ultimately shape the decision making process.

Guided by “Competing on Analytics” – Corios’ Research on Analytics Maturity

by Robin Way on October 10, 2017

“Competing on Analytics” was published 10 years ago, and is as relevant to business success today, as it was then.  At Corios, we wanted to build on the Davenport team’s important work by identifying: if a business enterprise finds itself in a particular rung of the analytics maturity ladder, what should it do to climb to the next rung?

Using the team’s analytic maturity tiers, we conducted our own qualitative and quantitative research in the field, based on decades of our own analytics practitioner and management consulting experience, gained through client engagements. We believe this provides a unique perspective, versus traditional approaches like survey research or interviews.

In partnership with The International Institute of Analytics, we developed an analysis of analytics maturity. We scored client cases on a range of measures, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to determine the characteristic qualities of companies at each tier of analytics maturity.

From a universe of over 200 engagements, we selected 60 engagements across 57 unique client organizations around the world (including the US, Canada, Europe and Australia). Once rated, we used statistical methods to assign each client into a cluster. We then analyzed the recommendations we delivered to each of these client engagements, and synthesized the similarities of those recommendations, and have summarized them here.

A: Competitive

  • Increase speed of deployment for models using transaction-level detail;
  • Increase alignment of IT with the business and analytics teams;
  • Increase alignment of analytics with business management, and between business teams;
  • Increase tech savvy of business teams

B: Capable

  • Build a larger analytics team
  • Build larger lists of more sophisticated models;
  • Develop a broader understanding of analytics among leadership, and a stronger alignment between analytics and decision making;
  • Develop the capability for real time scoring deployment

C: Aspiring

  • Drive cultural change to embrace analytics from the executive level down;
  • Repair the fractured relationships across business teams;
  • Move analytics from IT to the business, starting with a centralized team;
  • Develop a stronger alignment across customer strategy, and a more holistic use of analytics across products and strategies

D: Reactive

  • Increase analytics sophistication and capabilities, and grow the size of the analytics team, to maintain scale with business growth and demand for analytics;
  • Create stronger alignment between analytics and business, and among analytics teams throughout the enterprise;
  • Build a central analytics data repository;
  • Increase familiarity of business leadership with analytics capabilities

E: Aware

  • Build a customer analytics orientation from top-down;
  • Create visibility for the contribution of analytics towards revenue-contributing objectives;
  • Build an analytics data platform and company-wide initiatives to increase familiarity with analytics capabilities;
  • Modernize analytics skills among a centralized analytics team;
  • Increase IT agility in support of analytics and IT alignment with the business from the top down

To learn more, download our free book Skate Where the Puck is Headed.

Lessons Learned: Tying Operational Business Decisions to Model Scores

Data without decisions will not get you anywhere!
by Robin Way on October 9, 2017

The typical output of a model, usually called a “score,” is essentially a ranking or estimation of the most likely business outcomes, such as the most likely customer behavior in response to a stimulus (or the absence of a stimulus).

A score is not a decision. A decision is the proactive response of the business to the prospective customer behavior, usually involving the expenditure of resources and the monitoring of the performance of this decision. In a financial services setting, examples of these decisions include marketing, sales and service contacts with customers, debt recovery activities, and financial crime prevention decisions. Outside of the financial services industry, comparable examples of decisions are markdown and assortment in the retailing market, pricing and contract design in the telecommunications industry, preventive care program development, and outreach in the health care provider industry.

Lessons learned tying model results to decisions:
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  • The best rules systems implement business rules based on judgment and experience, as well as rules that prescriptively advise the SME on the trade-offs between alternatives in pure dollars and cents terms.
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  • The best performing offers and treatments are not the ones you will issue tomorrow. Instead, they will be the offers that your organization has refined over multiple waves of disciplined, rigorous trials paired with conscientious measurement.
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  • Business teams that commit resources to decisions will require the most convincing about the veracity of the analytic model results. Ensure your analytic story about the findings and recommendations of the model are well suited to these groups. Explain the nuances of customer behavior in terms that resonate with your audience. Find a willing listener from that constituency to help you develop your explanations in advance of the big presentation.

Learn more by reading our Red Paper Model Deployment: The Moment of Truth.

4 factors to make direct marketing campaign processes more efficient

Transparency, consistency and speed
by Robin Way on September 30, 2017
In this video, Corios is pleased to share a walk-through of a refined and more efficient marketing campaign process for a marketing team who is currently struggling with large number of campaigns, a high degree of decentralization, and a need to make all their campaign processes more agile and nimble.
By refining their processes, they hope to create greater consistency in their campaign processes, to reduce complexity and technical risk, to automate their campaign quality assurance processes, and to create greater transparency through change management.

4 things CRM systems don’t deliver for lead management, but should

There isn't a magic silver AI or machine learning algorithm either
by Robin Way on September 30, 2017
There are four essential capabilities that relationship managers need to properly manage their leads and client relationships, which CRM platforms really ought to offer out of the box, but which we’ve found are challenging to deliver in the real world.
These include:
  1. Client recognition, matching and householding
  2. Access to the complete view of the customer: including their products, transactions, and behavior
  3. Next best offer analytics
  4. Omnichannel marketing and sales orchestration
There’s no magic solution in prepackaged AI, machine learning and neural nets. Instead, this is where human subject matter experts, augmented by experience, insight and good data and analytics, are the key to building a sustainable solution.