Posted by S Swaminathan on Sun, Nov 30, 2008
Data services are freeing corporate data from the silos, allowing for its use on demand while providing security to the data's custodians. The demand for more data more quickly is driving IT departments to rethink their entire systems architectures.
At Cequity, we have been helping clients work within the constraints of multiple -source systems while making data accessible for marketing when they need it. Our philosophy has been to make data more flexible and easy to access so that enterprises can take advantage of huge amounts of data that they accumulate today.
Dana Gardner writes on how important it is to get rid of data silos for better customer management:
In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events, and transactions.
The move is in the ownership of data value to the very people who really need it, who help define its analysis, and who can best use it for business and consumption advantage. Analysis and productivity values rule the future of data as services. The [new] model is of keeping the data where it belongs and yet making it available to the rest of the world. Our data is trapped in these silos, where each department owns the data and there is a manual paper process to request a report.
According to Brad Svee, "Requesting a customer report takes a long time, and what we have been able to do is try to expose that data through Web services using mashup-type UI (user interface) technology and data services to keep the data in the place that it belongs, without having a flat file flying between FTP servers, as you talked about, and start to show people data that they haven't seen before in an instant, consumable way."
Read more on how to use your data for better customer management
Posted by S Swaminathan on Mon, Sep 01, 2008
Harbor Sweets is a Massachusetts-based gourmet chocolate company that offers a variety of premium sweets. In 1973, the company emerged from humble beginnings when Ben Strohecker set out to create the "best piece of candy in the world." The result was Sweet Sloops, a sailboat shaped piece of almond butter crunch, covered in white chocolate dipped in dark chocolate and crushed pecans. Over the years, the company grew to feature additional candy lines and retail outlets across the U.S. Harbor Sweets also added a significant mail-order catalog division.
Their catalog program was successful in delivering sales during key holiday buying seasons, but the company also wanted to ensure that holiday mail campaign mailings- the main driver of catalog business - were maximizing sales. Harbor Sweets needed a solution that would efficiently turn existing customer data into actionable next steps for their campaign planning. Essentially, Harbor Sweets wanted to find out if removing a single mailing to "active customers" from the holiday mail schedule - which included mailings every month from September through December - would conserve marketing resources, while refraining from negatively impacting revenue or overall response rates.
Harbor Sweets conducted a suppression test, assessing how effective the holiday campaign mailing had been at driving sales. To measure the effectiveness of their campaign services Harbor Sweets mailed the catalog to everyone in December and ran a suppression test for September, October and November. The results were surprising. Harbor Sweets was actually hurting sales by mailing too many catalogs to customers during the holiday season. The results also found that the cadence for the catalogs could be reduced to three, while still achieving similar results.
Additionally, Harbor Sweets learned firsthand that it is imperative to be open to analyzing data and customer behavior in new ways. The more information available on existing customers, the more effective the software is in its results, whether it is predicting customer's next steps or customer attrition.
The results allowed Harbor Sweet to develop a long-term customer-centric marketing process for the future. Better target identification results in the revenue saved by removing one mailing is now applied to another mailing during non-peak times to provide customers with a more effectively targeted, timely catalog.
Take a look at this DM review article which talks about how we can leverage customer behavior information for better
customer management