Keeping you in touch with your customers and your business!

Your business changes constantly, as do customers, and trying to find out what can trigger customer gains and losses is like hitting a moving target.

To maximise customer loyalty and lifetime value, it's extremely important that product, pricing, communications and visits are pitched correctly, and that customers in danger of defecting to your competitors are spotted in time for you to take corrective action.

This can be achieved by enhancing and combining your data, then analysing it in such a way as to really understand the trading patterns of your customers. When combined with external research and any changes in business process, this knowledge will also help identify factors that directly or indirectly influence sales and customer satisfaction. 

Armed with intelligence, business efficiency, profitability, customer retention and lifetime value can be improved, and sales and marketing activities tailored - on an individual basis - by behaviour and relevance to...

• Cross and up-sell other products to your existing customers - knowing what would appeal to them most strongly

• Get new profitable customers - as you will know what they look like and where to find them

• Reactivate lapsed customers - determining their past worth and what they might buy in the future

• Identify customers in danger of defecting to your competitors

• Spot high value customers who start to spend less and need special attention

• Maximise sales and franchise territory performance by taking account of market potential, customer value and call frequency, sales process, and salesperson skills, strengths and weaknesses

Use Tech4T to turn your data into knowledge - Solution Examples

• We identified a company's best customers. After first removing any record duplication, we enriched and segmented customers based on their sales value, who had brought most recently, and who had purchased more frequently. We compared the characteristics of the highest value customers against those in the overall database to develop a profile of the best customers. This enabled the client to recruit and develop more of the same! We also identified the geographical locations of these high value customers, tracked their value and purchasing patterns over time, and applied data mining to understand the key drivers of change against what was expected.   

• Spotting the reasons why a specific segment of loyal customers was lapsing in a restaurant. We merged and analysed three years of sales data, customer profile information, customer services and support issues, with feedback, human resource records for the management team, training courses they had undertaken, changes to product offering and price lists over time, etc. We discovered the main reason for customer attrition was due to a new manager more stringently applying company rules as to when - times and days in the week - a loyalty discount card could be used!

• Expanding sales territories. Our client in the energy sector wanted to take account of a two to three year window of opportunity for a specific product and expand their sales force from 35 to 120. Additionally, they wanted to expand another sales team in a different product area from 15 to 30. Where possible they wished to share sales people across the two product areas - but only where sales person's skills and their base location would contribute to overall sales and economy gains. We first undertook a market potential analysis to identify likely sales hot spots based on the appropriate customer profile, then devised an optimised territory infrastructure that took account of the UK road network and utilised a sub-territory building block approach. We identified the optimum base locations for each sales person to aid the recruitment process, analysed their cross-selling skills then combined sub-territories in such a way as to facilitate continued month-on-month sales team expansion.   

• Franchise territory development. A known problem in the franchise world is designing a territory infrastructure that delivers the maximum business gain for the franchisor. This means ensuring that the correct number of territories are created from the outset and each territory is right-sized in terms that it delivers sufficient opportunities to each franchisee. Not too many as this can result in a large proportion of the territory being left un-worked, nor a territory having insufficient opportunities so the franchisee struggles to reach their income targets. Knowing that each individual franchisee has different dynamics adds further complexity to this profit-potential optimisation challenge, but using a collection of territory design methodologies, sophisticated mapping systems and proven modeling techniques, we have developed flexible solutions for over 100 franchise operations across the globe. See franchise mapping.

• Rapid development of a single customer view marketing database, followed by niche segmentation. Our client wanted a solution that not only gave them a single view of their prospects, their customers and their sales transactions, but also a way to examine their data every-which-way without restriction. Working from a copy of their operational database and a collection of unstructured spreadsheets and lists, we created an enhanced database which included using telemarketing to enrich contact details and fill gaps in customer knowledge. We then turned this database into an on-line FastStats Discoverer targeting solution. This system was accessed directly by our client's marketing team to make complex selections with ease, analyse and profile their customers, then undertake behavioural email campaigns direct from the system. We kept the database up-to-date on a weekly basis. A side benefit was that other parts of the company could get answers to business queries in a matter of minutes! 
  A further phase involved exploring patterns in operational data to identify the key drivers for customer retention, and to develop an appropriate customer segmentation system to classify people sharing similar characteristics into groups for target marketing. The conventional segmentation methods find groups of people sharing similar characteristics but often miss niche segments where individuals fall across the segment divisions. Using Viscovery, we quickly identified these high-value people who were then subjected to the appropriate marketing treatment.  Result - £5m sales lift!

• Realigning sales territories. The challenge was to reduce the size of a sales force by 20% whilst at the same time making sure that the right customers were still visited the right number of times. We first removed duplication from the customer file, calculated lifetime value and trading patterns, then devised the optimum call frequency for each customer. Customers with strong customer-to-sales person relationships were identified, and an appropriate strategy devised to develop a new territory structure that also included optimisation by drive-times. New territory boundary maps were created and Postal allocation files updated. Further work included creating optimised call scheduling and route planning. Job done

• Individually personalised maps for 'welcome' mailing. Our financial services client wanted to send a mailing to several million customers - with the challenge of including a personalised map in each mailing. This was to show each customer's location, and, based on varying drivetime rules, a pre-defined number of individually selected retailers. After much development we created the analysis and mapping application and generated the maps in just a few weeks. We also created statistics for every individual in relation to their nearest outlets. Welcome maps. 

• Integrated CRM, e-marketing and targeting solution. A client wanted a complete solution that would integrate a 'work-flow' based CRM/ERP system, unrestricted segmentation and targeting, trackable e-marketing and text messaging. We combined the right technologies to achieve just this! FastStats Discoverer, Diamonds, Viscovery and an appropriate e-marketing system. See the big picture

• Using analytics to drive up sales from an email and direct mail campaign. Our client, a magazine publisher, wanted to lift the number of subscriptions they sold from a direct marketing campaign and approached Tech4T for help. We analysed their consumer subscription files looking for patterns in transactional data that would help select the best magazine to promote for each individual. We then created the data files to individually personalise email and A5 mailing cards, varying the image and content to that of a specific magazine, and analysed the resulting web pages visited and the time spent on each. From this, for people who hadn't ordered, we selected the magazine where most interest had been identified, and sent a new email campaign - again personalised on a 1-2-1 basis to promote these 'target' subscriptions. The process was repeated 3 times. The result - a four fold increase in new subscriptions.