Gathering intelligence is the secret to success

1 July 2010 | By Lucy Handley

In association with

MW: How can you manage data intelligently? Does it all come down to a single customer view (SCV)?

AB: It is ultimately about taking all the data you have about your clients and putting it together in one place. Then you overlay external data to make sure you freshen it up and keep it valid. The barrier to this is internal ownership of multiple databases.

JB: The idea that you put all your data into one pot is great, but the challenge is what you then do as a marketer and how you make others see it as an opportunity. We have an SCV that has taken a couple of years to build. Within BBC Worldwide, we’ve seen growth from 300,000 to almost 1 million subscriptions, so having a database has been critical. A subscriber is twice as likely to take out a reader offer, for example.

The challenge with the SCV is the technology and how it avoids being very IT-based, so it allows you to run trigger-based email campaigns or to run things internationally.

CB: The endgame isn’t the SCV - it is meeting customer needs. I don’t think customers necessarily expect that you know everything about them at every single touchpoint. They want things to be kept simple in our sector.

MW: Where are you currently in the process of building an intelligent data system?

SK: We have implemented our SCV from a marketing standpoint, but we need to improve the operational view of our customers. We have ended up with a data warehouse that is very operational and was built by

IT people for IT people. But fundamentally, marketers have got to leverage value from it.
At one stage, only one or two people understood what was in the warehouse, so we have built a “marketing datamart”, which is a flexible platform that allows us to alter our SCV. We are looking to manage interactions for our customers with our call centres and how we can inform our door-to-door sales team.

AnC: Our company has only been around three and a half years, but we’ve got nearly 300,000 customers. I suppose we do have an SCV but I’m not sure whether that is the Holy Grail. What is important is what we do with it.

We work in the grey market [the over-50s consumer] and a lot of our business is done over the phone. The key for us is enhancing their channel preference. Insurance is a once-a-year purchase. We know we need to be price sensitive and customer service is also key. We work on using the information we have in terms of creating consumer touchpoints through the year.

AV: We are probably at the start of the process. Our direct business has only been around for six to seven years and it is very acquisition focused. What we are doing now is smarter in terms of looking at the customers we’ve got, their lifetime values and then working out which are the ones we should be reaching. We are working on that but we have a long way to go.

TW: At Best Western, we are quite a way down the line. We’ve had a database for seven to eight years that gives a view across our customers staying with us. Part of the problem is the goal posts keep moving. Integrating web analytics into our customer data is a huge challenge, especially as the channels continually change.

MW: Why are so many brands still at the beginning of this journey?

RB: One reason is because of integration issues and campaigns. In that regard, having a high street and online presence helps because you have multiple opportunities to interact.

But that is quite different when it comes to an SCV. There is a retail nirvana where the retailer remembers you from your first point of contact, through to your purchase and on to your post-purchase relationship. The people that seem to be doing best are the supermarket retailers. There is something about multiple contacts and data collection points that allow you to mine that data effectively.

GT: We have not scratched the surface of it - I say that from a Barclaycard point of view. The financial services sector tends to take a view of things by campaign rather than a single customer viewpoint. Financial services tend to be obsessed by measuring campaigns rather than customer value.

AV: Hiscox’s business traditionally came from brokers, so we must juggle the business through them. We also have a direct business where we have our household customers. It’s pulling all that data together so we don’t make mistakes, such as mailing a household already doing business with us through a broker. We have to make sure every time they interact with us they have a really good experience. All our customer journey work shows that aspect is more important than we ever thought.

CP: Very few people have got near to a complete SCV or will ever do so. You’ve got to move over from an “account view” to a “customer view”, which is still a big barrier.

Then you have to put insight and market research into your product portfolio and be able to talk to people in a way that doesn’t seem to be interruptive. If it is disruptive, it’s got to be really well targeted. Maybe that involves taking a layer of data from your SCV database and then using it to populate things that happen on your website.

MW: Should the SCV be held within marketing or owned by the whole business?

AdC: An SCV involves all parts of the business. Our high-value customer segment is extremely important and we have information on them that goes down to shop level. That needs to be activated through operations; they need to know what to do with that data at any given time. In a retail environment, you would fail without a full understanding all the way through.

 

GJ: We used to grapple with that issue; the understanding of the customer always resided in marketing and we needed support from elsewhere in the organisation. Our research function sits within marketing but we do invest a lot of time in socialising those insights across the business.

TW: Marketing has to lead [the process] and then integrate it with the rest of the business. We need the data and insight but we still need big ideas and innovation. Marketing has evolved so much we need to get the balance between the data, the insight to help our campaigns, driving the return on investment and the big idea. It’s dangerous to focus on an SCV without getting the product or brand right.

JB: An SCV is not just about marketing, it has to be at the heart of your operations. It’s really important to be able to demonstrate the value of customers so everyone can treat them well. BBC Worldwide has to live up to the values of the Trust and the BBC. We take it seriously and always sort things out for customers. The more data you capture, the more the customer expects from you. If any department gets it wrong, a customer gets really cross.

MW: How is an SCV affected by developing marketing channels, such as online or social media? How close to real-time data are we?

NC: In financial services, it’s become even more difficult because of regulation. The marketing campaign that we’ve launched has been very successful, but there are still areas, like real-time responding, that we need to develop. If your customers are using social media, that is where we need to be having conversations with them, in the same way that we need to be interacting with them on the phone.

RB: We have savvy customers who all use social media. So you have completely different channels there that aren’t traditional retail. You then start overlaying things like location-based services, such as Facebook locations versus Foursquare.

JB: We all like to think we can talk to consumers in segments in certain ways; but you have to be aware of all the media out there. For example, you can segment TV audiences, but you need to think about how the messages integrate across all your communications. That’s where an SCV starts to help you answer these challenges.

TW: With the growth of social media, there are more people interacting online with the brand in a social environment, so how do you bring those people in? In a way, it’s a never-ending journey to try to get there. The focus shouldn’t be on trying to get to an SCV, it should be on trying to understand real customer insights.

MW: Do you choose certain marketing channels due to your customers’ preferences?Or do you pick a particular channel because it is best to communicate a message in that format?

CP: It’s down to what is going to work for the customer, aligned with what works for you. If you think that data on its own is going to drive what you need to do, you will get into a whirling spiral of marketing hell. Likewise, if you have the insight but you don’t have a structure that allows you to capture and manipulate the right data, then you are not going to be able to take action on it.

MD: In my experience, marketers are naturally business-minded and inquisitive. If you are not switched on to that way of thinking, you will always look at what you are pushing out rather than stepping back and listening to customers.

Our commodity is information and we have to know what our customers are looking at; they need it quickly and it has to be of value. There is no point in us having what someone else does because they won’t come back to us or pay a premium for what we do. It comes back to the crux of marketing - understanding customer demand and satisfying them profitably.

MW: How do you gather all the data from different audiences? Who is responsible for this and for turning it into a business-wide asset?

MD: It comes down to the marketing team, but it needs buy-in from the publishing and commercial sides too. We also have aggregators, such as Reuters and Bloomberg, which share our content and bring it from our sites to their channels.

Our concern is that we can see whether an advertiser wants to reach certain people and provide the content for that, but we also have to measure our own campaigns. From the business-to-business side, it’s circulation-driven. We understand our readers. You can engage them through “normal” channels but the biggest problem is the advance of online content and finding out what people are reading, where they are reading it and bringing it back into the subscriber base.

MW: How important is creating and maintaining an SCV compared with other marketing functions?

CB: We are at the start of the journey because it is so hard to do. There are better things to be thinking about, such as call centres or face-to-face contact. Having it joined up across all the touchpoints is less important, provided you’ve got quality people on the phones.

AB: An SCV would allow us to drive campaigns and messages to customers in a personalised way, through the right channel. The driving force behind this is understanding what your customer wants today, what you understand about them and how much you can target them. So it’s the integration of customer data with external marketing data and external credit data.

JB: Bits of our business are now very consumer-focused while other parts have a more B2B focus, so we have to translate the data into many areas. Real-time marketing makes a big difference. We will get four times the response rate from people who have just done something with us than we would have got from people who haven’t. So the challenge is how you build on that insight.

GT: What I’ve heard about the SCV from around the table is quite pragmatic and selfish. If you asked a customer what an SCV would be, they might describe it as brands being able to understand what relationship they want with you and what exactly they personally want out of that relationship. The marketing process should be there to support that, not define it - which is what we tend to do as marketers.

MW: How can you use data as a management tool, for example, to help a customer services agent live the brand effectively?

AV: We invest a lot in our call centres. Our marketing team briefs them on who the customer is. We talk about the architecture of their houses [for home insurance] and we talk to them about campaigns. If we get call centres wrong, that would be a complete disaster. They are seen as an extension of the marketing department.

CB: Data is a brand management tool in the way that advertising is a brand management tool or customer service is an interaction with the brand. We should be defining the brand across all the touchpoints and data is a tool that enables us to do that.

MD: We’ve just launched a new product around wealth management in Asia and that is driven by a massive growth in online searches and readership into that area. You have to look for the opportunities that come your way and listen to the customer. I think an SCV really enables you to act and if you are part of a company that can listen, you can move into new markets quickly.

MW: Is it hard to convince corporate decisionmakers that there is value in an SCV?

NC: It goes right to the top, so this is on the radar of Paul Thurston, who is at the top of HSBC in the UK. We give him regular updates.

GT: Within Barclaycard, our customer plans are owned at the highest level. They are presented in a business review to the chief executive of Barclays in the same light as a yearly financial plan.

RB: If you are lucky, your CEO is a marketer. If you take a company like Apple, for example, it has the world’s most powerful branding and marketing. That is not the ad campaigns - that is about the best products delivered in a customer-centric way.

MW: How do you allocate budgets regarding the SCV? Or are budgets still largely focused on discrete campaigns and above-the-line ads?

GT: It is unfair to suggest that. At Barclaycard, we have introduced a planning team that starts from the customer, rather than the campaign. That team thinks about customers’ lives and then about big ideas, the channels and finally the execution.

CP: Typically, SCV projects are not budgeted, executed and resolved in a single financial year, so there needs to be a longer-term strategy. It’s no different from any other business need but it is away from campaign marketing or product promotions. Marketers have recently faced the difficulty of the financial squeeze and it’s down to the senior levels to take a view on where they need to be now.

RB: For us, one of the challenges is the flexibility versus the investment decision. We need to have the ability to look two or three years into the future. It’s about how much the customer is present in the boardroom and how much that is considered as part of the strategy. We have stripped down our organisation and are probably a more streamlined department now, relative to our presence on the high street and revenue.

CP: You have to be agile enough to keep changing as an organisation, which comes back to the fact that you never know if you will take over another retail outlet and manage that customer base into a single execution.

MW: Are marketers responsible for the relationship with any outsourced data suppliers? How does the IT department fit in?

RB: IT and marketing aren’t necessarily traditional bedfellows. For us, IT is in the driving seat when it comes to customer data. Part of that is down to finding solutions involving the underlying infrastructure. It depends on all sorts of things, like the legacy systems that you’ve got, your IT investment strategy or what the latest technologies are.

SK: I am the data specialist at Sky within marketing. I need the ability to translate business requirements into data and then communicate it to the IT function or vice-versa. Where the IT infrastructure is too limiting, I need to come up with a solution that will meet the business requirements.

MW: So the future could be more about business intelligence rather than an SCV as we understand it now. Is there a need for arestructure?

CB: There has recently been a restructure within Aviva UK [which owns RAC]. There are two big businesses - general insurance and life and pensions, which operated very separately. We have brought in a UK CEO to oversee the two businesses and created a separate commercial function to drive the synergies. The joined-up customer view is one of these.

The refreshing thing about the Aviva restructure isn’t cost saving; the intention is genuinely driving customer experience to align the brand across the two businesses. It’s about cost generation, not cost reduction.

It is partly about creating better customer experiences but the primary driver is customer value and how can we leverage more profit out of it. But that is going to be difficult to do.

AC: I’ve worked in a number of businesses where you have internal competition for customers. One of the key benefits is unpicking that with a longer-term view in mind, which is about the total overall value of that customer over a period of time.

GT: I sometimes feel like restructuring is the easy answer - restructure and it will work. And inevitably it doesn’t.

RB: There is a philosophy that says there is no single structure and the answer is to continually move between different ones. We will see.