Teradata

For marketing departments, these are historically challenging times. The overwhelming informational clutter that surrounds businesses and consumers – from blogs and wikis to instant messaging, video content and pop-up ads – can feel like an impenetrable wall. Tight budgets, restrictive regulations, and savvy consumers make it extremely difficult to bust through that wall, so response rates to marketing initiatives tend to hover around five percent or less. That's not good enough when marketers are under intensifying pressure to deliver better business returns.

The good news is that a few thought leaders have knocked down the wall and broken through the clutter to garner response rates as much as ten times as high as the typical campaign. How do they do it? First, they corral all their disparate data on an ongoing basis and apply sophisticated analytics to create a single, comprehensive, and up-to-date view of their customers. They then transform that customer view into personalized campaigns that restrict communications to products and services that matter most to the customer and address an immediate need.

The results go beyond double-digit response rates for select initiatives. These companies build strong and loyal customer relationships rooted in an unshakably positive brand. Their customers actually look forward to hearing from them. That is the future of marketing.

While no one should pretend that shifting from 5 percent to 50 percent response rates is easy, it is not as complicated as many believe. There are three rules that can serve as the pillars for smarter marketing.

When every communication has to be relevant, timely, and personally significant, you need an in-depth understanding of each individual customer. All and any types of customer data can be valuable, which is why industry leading marketing organizations collect and store detailed current and historical data from so many different sources. They use all their customer touchpoints (e.g., websites, call centers, ATMs, POS kiosks, and fuel pumps, depending on the industry) as well as data from applications, surveys, and third party organizations.

It's not enough, however, to gather the data. One of the keys to deriving value is timely integration of this data so you can discern customer behavior that identifies needs and preferences, as well as descriptive demographics: a complete and up-to-date view of the customer. In addition, the timely nature of more personalized campaigns means that: a) you need that customer view reliably and frequently updated and, b) you can't wait to transfer data to expensive data marts constructed for each and every initiative. Successful marketing organizations, therefore, need to have a way to rapidly gather all customer information in one place, and in a form that makes it accessible to sophisticated analytics that uncover revealing patterns or "trigger" events gleaned from one or more of the many sources available.

The single customer view makes it possible to uncover event triggers and patterns of behavior that may have been previously undetectable. Some groups, with certain common characteristics, will exhibit similar behaviors: perhaps they purchase certain or combinations of items at certain times, or there is a sudden change in cell phone calling patterns, or they make repeated attempts to overdraw their account from an ATM machine. Marketleading organizations can spot these events and behaviors from among hundreds of thousands or millions of customers and their transactions. Then they can immediately turn this information around into tailored, high-response contacts about sales or service opportunities.

They do this by using analytics and business rules to comb through all of the behavioral data to identify subtle changes that indicate an opportunity to provide value. The same process indicates the best ways to personalize messages or offers that contain the right graphic, the best offer, and the right price. The result will be many small groups of individuals who you can contact appropriately about a sales or service opportunity. Remember, traditional communications to large groups got us where we are today: SPAM filters, Do Not Call lists, and the disgruntled and fatigued customers who wind up on target lists. Smarter marketing requires more targeted, relevant, and timely communications.

The third rule addresses the fact that there are hundreds of business rules looking for many kinds and combinations of behaviors. This raises the question of priority. What if a customer qualifies for multiple or even many communications at any particular time? Do you want to contact them about ten things all at once? How do you prioritize complaints or service inquiries versus informational messages?

The obvious answer is that you handle different types of communications differently. Smarter marketing requires that communications to customers, whether sales or service, be prioritized and limited to only the best few for each customer at any given time. And since this is customer driven, you cannot always predict the proper mix. Therefore, the optimization must be automated and dynamic to address the many options and preferences that your customers have.

In addition, you will need the ability to monitor and measure all of your activities: every customer contact through every channel and every action customers take. You will need to understand and track the effectiveness, and then refine any aspect of your activities or content to continually improve and prioritize communications.

When you can actually live by the three rules described above – which only a small percentage of companies can do today – you gain considerable competitive advantage. Teradata Relationship Manager enables you to live by those rules and thrive.

Teradata Relationship Manager is a proven multi-channel customer management solution that combines analytical intelligence and marketing automation to drive relevant and timely customer communications. It is optimized for the Teradata system, enabling you to leverage the full range of your company's data – and all available Teradata strengths and features.

Teradata Relationship Manager is built around the concepts of significance, relevance, and timeliness – and rooted in our decade-long leadership in event-based marketing. It simplifies and accelerates the process, improves efficiency, reduces costs, and helps you create and optimize communications across all channels so the most effective offers and messages reach customers at the most opportune moment. In numerous settings it has delivered measurable results that range from dramatic reductions in cycle times (e.g., 7 weeks to four days) to response rates of 70 percent on contacts made within 24 hours a of a qualifying event.

"This is what the future of business-to-consumer marketing looks like," says Lisa Loftis, a consultant for Intelligent Solutions, Inc., a professional services firm which assesses and guides business intelligence and customer analytics initiatives. "The ability to coordinate a consistent thread of multi-step conversations with customers across multiple touch points is the holy grail of marketing. Companies that rely on sophisticated customer engagements for brand differentiation and competitive advantage would be well-advised to closely examine Teradata Relationship Manager."

Smarter marketing demands that you understand such things as the styles and brands your customers like to purchase, the channels they prefer, and what is going on in their lives right now. In short, if you want your communications or offers to customers to be both relevant and timely, they need to be rooted in the data you collect in and from various systems. That data must be reliable, comprehensive, and current. Knowing that customers looked at a product on your website yesterday doesn't help if you don't know they purchased the item in your store earlier today.

Teradata Relationship Manager provides unparalleled access to the highest performing database of customer information available anywhere: Teradata. The Teradata system provides the most complete and up to date view of your customers by consolidating and integrating customer profile and interaction data from all of your customer contact channels. This allows Teradata Relationship Manager to base its analyses and campaigns on the best possible information, ensuring relevance and timeliness in every customer contact.

"My recommendation to chief executives and chief information officers seeking to drive intelligence deep into their enterprise is to look for a vendor that has the capability to extend the support for decision making beyond corporate management to all functions across the organization, maximizing both operational and strategic decisions," says Donald Feinberg, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner, Inc. "To deliver this level of data warehouse solution, the vendor must be able to provide extreme service levels in the areas of performance, concurrent users, scalability, data freshness, and system availability while managing both operational and strategic workloads."

Increase Intelligence

Possibly the biggest determinant of the success of a marketing campaign – whether it be promotional, service, or informational – is targeting the right people with each promotion. Sending offers and messages to people who are not interested risks ambivalence at best and, at worst, hostility against your company and brand. Conversely, the first step toward smarter marketing is selecting the right customers for each message.

Teradata Relationship Manager automatically identifies simple to complex customer behavior across channels and over time and, in doing so provides you with more and better ways to identify the right customers to contact with the right message at the right time. Multiple selection and analytic options address many types of users, from business users who know little or nothing about technology to "power users" who are familiar with the underlying database and SQL programming. You can develop customer lists in a variety of ways, depending on how you prefer to work – and all of the options share the same underlying, comprehensive customer database, assuring consistency and synergy across or even outside the organization. Equally important, all of the options produce segments that are easily sharable and reusable.

The idea is simple: smarter marketing results from better customer targeting, facilitated by easier access to user-appropriate tools and comprehensive data. That's what Teradata Relationship Manager provides.

Automate Personalized Dialog

Of course, it's not enough to produce intelligently segmented customer lists. How you communicate with consumers is critical to smarter marketing because it is the centerpiece of building relationships and closing sales.

The challenge is that consumers are smarter than ever. They are highly sensitive to impersonal, mass marketing approaches and want, instead, an ongoing dialog that is relevant and timely. Such a dialog implies that before buying they will have all of their questions and concerns answered about all the choices available to them – from cell phone plans to insurance and investment products.

Anticipating customer needs and addressing them with an automated, relevant, and ongoing dialog has major advantages: It avoids missed follow-up opportunities. It saves the time and effort otherwise spent developing separate campaigns. And it drives better results.

Teradata Relationship Manager provides a unique capability to automate the sales process, including follow-up with more information, transfer to a more appropriate channel (such as a Customer Service Representative), or deletion from a contact list. Each step in the resulting multi-step dialog is generated based on the previous contact. This leads to smarter marketing because it enhances the personalization and relevance of communications all along the way.

"Communicating to millions of individual customers through a variety of channels is complex and challenging," says Itzhak Malach, First Executive, head of operations, information systems and administration at Bank Leumi. "Bank Leumi is using its Teradata system…tools to create relevant dialogues with customers across channels and serve them wherever they are. As a result, we have seen constant improvement in our customer management program performance."

Why have more than 130 million Americans signed up for the national Do Not Call List? Why do households all over the world send dozens of expensive marketing mailings to the trash bin every week without looking at them? Why are more and more consumers using SPAM filters to reduce the clutter in their "in-box" without even looking at the email? Part of the reason is pure volume. Most consumers receive dozens or hundreds of unwanted offers, many from the same vendors, and have learned just to trash them. Unfortunately, this means even relevant offers or information can go unnoticed, hardly the stuff of smarter marketing.

In contrast, Teradata Relationship Manager provides unique contact optimization capabilities that automatically detect "over communication" with individual customers. A module in Relationship Manager automatically enforces enterprise business rules that govern how frequently and how recently you communicate with your customers – across all campaigns and channels. Using campaign and customer ranking models, Teradata Relationship Manager limits communications for each customer, ensuring that the communications that they do receive are the best messages in the right amounts. In turn, your customers will appreciate every contact you make and respond with greater frequency. What could be smarter marketing than generating appreciative and responsive customers?

Of course, no technology can create a smarter marketing program on its own; your people need to be able and willing to use the technology. That's why Teradata Relationship Manager is built for marketers, not statisticians. It has a user-friendly, browser-based interface, as well as features that simplify otherwise complex tasks. This includes such features as: the ability to quickly and easily find the attributes you are looking for in the database; repetitive import of third party target lists, and; automated generation of commonly used splits (subsegments of target segments used for enhanced personalization).

Moreover, because your marketing department does a lot of work to prepare, plan, design, and build top notch promotional and informational communications, Teradata Relationship Manager's ease of use goes beyond the individual user. By enabling you to easily share reusable and leverageable ideas and analysis, your organization doesn't have to recreate the wheel for every campaign. In turn, talented marketing professionals concentrate their efforts on creativity and innovation – not tedious, repetitive tasks. Thus, you have a stronger, more efficient group and protection against inevitable retirements or people moving on; you can sustain your smarter marketing regardless of inevitable workforce shifts.

More specifically, using Teradata Relationship Manager – and appropriate authorization – you can reuse, and modify analyses of customer segments. You can share and reuse segments that have been created, such as high customer value, frequent shoppers, opt-out lists, control groups, and seed lists. You can promote and enforce the use of best practice campaign templates, which include pre-built and customizable collateral, messages, channel definitions, success criteria, and sophisticated multi-step dialogs. And you can track and manage all objects created in the system with version control, history, and quick access to usage analysis.

Teradata's visionary approach, technical expertise, and unique functionality have made it possible to turn this vision into reality today. By keeping our focus on the three simple rules – gather the information, detect the opportunities, and act through tailored campaigns and prioritized communications – Teradata has made it possible for companies to break through the marketing clutter and achieve unprecedented returns on their marketing investments. Lower costs, greater efficiency, and increased effectiveness – driven by intelligence. The result is a loyal customer base that has a deep understanding and appreciation of the company's brand. Smarter marketing doesn't get any smarter than that.

For more information about how Teradata Relationship Manager can help your business, contact your Teradata representative or visit www.teradata.com/v6.