Customer Intelligence – The Key to Success

Customer intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering and analyzing information regarding customers, and their details and activities, to build deeper and more effective customer relationships and improve decision-making by vendors. CI can apply to any industry. The approach may vary slightly by industry, but will be substantially like the healthcare use case described below.

CI begins with the basic key facts about the customer, such as their name, gender, geographic location, etc. This data is then augmented with performance data that may include transactions, activities like purchase history or other types of customer interactions. The data can be gathered from several sources like ERP, marketing statistics from email or ad campaigns or interactions, from service contacts over the phone and via e-mail, etc.

The first step, and often the biggest challenge, is to bring all the data together in a format that can be analyzed (see Figure 1 below). By mining this data, and placing it in context with wider information about competitors, conditions in the industry, and general trends, information can be obtained about customers’ existing and future needs, how they reach decisions, and predictions made about their future behavior.

Benefits

1. Better insights into customer profile and behavior
2. Improved productivity, effectiveness, and conversion rates
3. Better campaign definition and targeting to improve marketing ROI
4. Can create drip campaigns and set triggers based on activity
5. Campaign data is automatically aggregated into the data warehouse
6. Perform advanced analytics on the combined data
7. Publish reports for internal use or make reports available through customer portals

Customer Intelligence Notional Architecture

Healthcare Use Case

One of our clients is a business unit of a company in the healthcare vertical. They receive funding from drug manufacturers to market to medical practices and individual physicians. The goal of the email marketing campaigns is to recruit physicians to events or to develop awareness and demand for specific drugs. Each business unit operates independently, but can utilize core services offered by the enterprise digital marketing team.

The Challenge

The business unit had been utilizing core services from the enterprise digital marketing team. The business unit provided the distribution list and the email content to the digital marketing team. The email would be published to the distribution list. After two weeks, the business unit received a canned performance report. There were considerable limitations with this approach.

1. Overall results were lower than desired
2. The timeliness of each campaign was not predictable
3. It was very difficult to measure the effectiveness of each campaign
4. No visibility into bounces and opt-outs so bounce rates continued to be very high
5. No ability to measure the quality of acquired distribution lists
6. No ability to run drip campaigns based on receiver actions
7. No flexibility in reporting to the manufacturers
8. No access to API’s to bring information back into the business unit data warehouse

Our Solution

We developed a new CI solution that gave the business unit the ability to run and manage their own campaigns. (Figure 1) This new solution included Net-Results as the marketing automation tool. We used the Net-Results APIs to connect to the business unit data warehouse. This allows for the campaign statistics to be automatically aggregated into the data warehouse, for data to be analyzed and specific reports generated and consumed as desired.

Figure 1 – Customer Intelligence Architecture

The overall campaign performance has increased significantly since the new solution was implemented. The business unit is now able to show improved return on investment to the drug manufacturers. This will help ensure ongoing or potentially increased funding and may help differentiate our Client from other competitors.

Benefits of the new Customer Intelligence solution

1. Improved productivity, effectiveness, and conversion rates
2. Full control over when campaigns are published
3. Receive immediate feedback on the campaign performance
4. Can now clean the distribution list by removing bounces and opt-outs.
5. Can create drip campaigns and set triggers based on activity
6. Ability to measure the quality of acquired lists
7. Campaign data is automatically aggregated into the data warehouse through the Net-Results API
8. Perform advanced analytics on the combined data
9. Publish reports for internal use or make reports available through customer portals