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From the desk of Sam Gragg, director of Customer Management Solutions Marketing
Teradata customer management solutions marketing
According to many analysts, Teradata CRM is a leader in its market space. What enhancements are being added to maintain this leadership in the future? What's next?
To a degree, the future of Teradata CRM is being shaped by our customers across industries and business environments. Teradata CRM is designed for the real world, and the real world is dynamic. However, we're not going to change our basic strategy and direction-it's really a matter of working with our customers to create the future together.
An important element in this equation is our sponsorship of the Teradata Center for CRM at Duke University. This involves a network of scholars focused on best practices and new frontiers in marketing science, not only at Duke but also throughout the world. We're actively working with the center and its business thought leaders-building connections between our customers and the Center through executive business management and marketing programs and events held at Duke University multiple times each year.
With this combination of academic research-oriented activities and our relationships with other thought leaders in the consulting and analyst community-and, of course, our customers-we bring much more than a tool. We really bring an actionable, pragmatic vision focused around customer management as a unique science and professional discipline.
Moreover, in terms of the future we continually look at what can be enabled through tighter integration with the database: better integrated messaging systems, more flexible architecture and, as always, new ways to optimize the customer experience with data.
We're looking at all those kinds of things and planning features and functions for future releases. We're further improving ease of deployment and ease of integration. You will also start seeing more and more componentization of the application.
Looking to the future again, what are we seeing companies doing with CRM technology that may be leading indicators of business practices yet to come?
We have a customer who is actively using the ATM channel to deliver personalized offers and messages. This is more than the usual "favorite transaction" kind of thing. It's really driven from the data warehouse, looking at each individual-his or her personal profile-and using that data to deliver the right message at the right place through the ATM channel, which is the least exploited communication channel in banking. In the retail space, clients are also using the data warehouse for deep personalization of offers, then linking that into things seemingly mundane, like optimizing the coupons that customers receive before they go to the store. This allows businesses to make best use of alternatives like vendor-sponsored promotions or maybe some other internal category objective.
Other things we're helping develop are event-based scenarios aimed at advanced management and optimization of leads. In other words, if a customer comes into your bank or store and exhibits a certain kind of behavior, you want to be able to respond to that in an intelligent, automated and optimized way-such as sending the lead to your branch manager to follow up.
The real push we're seeing is the importance of balance: optimizing customer experiences with value to the business-profitable revenue and customer equity. On the experience side, it's about stage-managing at touchpoints-managing what the customer sees and senses based on intelligence from the "customer experience database," the enterprise data warehouse. Balance that with cost mechanics and business logistics so that customer experiences are managed in an automated fashion. Businesses are also thinking about how to choose the things that leverage their sales forces most effectively. Those are the things that Teradata CRM allows by really connecting the power of Teradata with the operational channels that run the day to day business.
How important an issue is channel optimization in the CRM market space?
Managing complexity is always important-it's
the core issue with any business. It
is increasingly important to have a
better way to manage how you actually
utilize your customer channels. For
example, if a customer behavior triggers
a lead and you have an opportunity to
interact, dialogue or sell something
to this customer, then you have several
factors to consider, such as the value
of the customer and how much you can
spend pursuing the lead.
So you have to look at the effectiveness of the channel: is this customer more likely to buy through a branch person or by talking to a call center agent. You would define rules for specific customers and behaviors to factor in, such as the channel cost and effectiveness, customer channel preferences and the value of the customer. It helps to be able to do "load leveling" and design the communications to deliver over the best channel for the best purpose. In addition, if you have limited capacity in a call center, you would need to make sure that the capacity is used most effectively. For example, if your call center or your branch manager has a capacity of three leads per day, you don't want to dump down a hundred leads when only a few can be followed up. So you want to make sure those three or four leads per day are actually the best, hottest leads at that time.
Teradata CRM allows you to do that without then losing the extra opportunity. So if you're going to limit leads to three or four to the branch manager, then maybe you need to do something else with the other 96 leads that you generated that day. Again, Teradata CRM can pick the right four leads for the branch personnel as well as either hold the other leads or redirect them through another channel. It's important to balance, manage and optimize every channel-and it's something else that's unique to Teradata CRM.
The Version 5.1 collateral emphasizes the role of your clients in shaping the functionality of each successive version of Teradata CRM. Can you elaborate?
The whole customer management program has definitely evolved in collaboration with our customers over the years. From the beginning, Teradata clients have had a significant role in the design and development of our customer management solutions. Today, we have a very interactive user community. We have user groups that meet regularly to share inside information and solutions to problems they have encountered. This information helps us understand the kinds of solutions our customers need and gives us direction for the future.
I think it's interesting that within the same user group meetings you'll find a mix of individuals and professional disciplines. Some are business users looking at business strategy and business implementation, and some are technology specialists looking at better ways to manage and deploy the solutions through their enterprises. There are many, many conversations and dialogues going on at multiple levels-and our user input really means a lot to us.
We know that the real-time velocity of data management in the Teradata platform contributes to the freshness of analytical intelligence that Teradata CRM delivers. What exactly does Teradata CRM do to minimize data latency?
It's absolutely true that the Teradata Warehouse provides fresher, faster, more accurate data when and where it's needed. Teradata CRM captures and analyzes that refreshed data in the database as it arrives, in seconds, from every touchpoint across the enterprise. We do not go through time-consuming aggregations and model development based on data that's a week or a month old. Teradata CRM starts with a complete, up-to-the-minute view of customer data and converts it into actionable intelligence that's routed in real time to the end point where it's needed. That point may be a self-service channel, a branch, a store or a Web site-adding personalization, contact timing and channel optimization as it races on, adding higher relevance to the customer en route. We do more than connect the dots; we add value at every dot so the most direct line is also the most valuable one for the business and the customer.
I call this "active analytics"-the ability to automate and program
the analytics directly into the customer campaign or communication plan,
adding value as it travels to the touchpoint. This is in contrast with other
CRM tools, where a tool first runs an analysis to create insight. That's
step one. Then you have to then go someplace else and do something with
that insight. You need to call up your call center, put it into a batch
file and send some data, all steps that can slow you down. It's like running
a relay race where you stop and rest at each point rather than compete to
win. T
© Teradata Magazine-September 2004
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