Teradata

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify marketing programs that rely on things like statement stuffers, generic phone calls, and pop-up ads. The single digit response rates such programs generate don’t cut it in an era when data-driven insights into customer behaviors can drive response rates upwards of 60%, even as they reduce expenses, improve retention, and dramatically strengthen customer relationships.

Since 1997, Teradata Corporation has been helping companies from around the globe develop sophisticated Event-Based Marketing (EBM) systems that virtually eliminate expensive, under-performing mass marketing campaigns and enable timely communications tailored specifically to high-value customers. Our solution allows you to recognize and even anticipate simple or complex changes in an individual customer’s behavior and activity and then contact that customer in a timely manner with a strikingly relevant sales or service message.

Our results speak for themselves. Top companies from around the world, representing industries as diverse as finance, insurance, telecommunications, retail, and travel have experienced immediate results with EBM, including:

• Response rates of 60% or more on limited, highly targeted communications
• Advertising and mass marketing expenses reduced by 75% over five years while generating leads that are up to five times more profitable
• Churn reduced by more than 30% among high-value customers
• 98% customer satisfaction rating among the highest value segments
• Customer defection reduced by as much as 10 points

The bottom line is that your customers’ behavior is already revealing what they need and when they need it. Your task is to recognize the opportune moment and to act on it automatically with a winning offer. Teradata® Event-Based Marketing solution makes that possible.

Customer behavior almost always indicates a specific interest or need. Something as simple as searching for products or services on a web site or calling to register a complaint about lost baggage or dropped cell phone calls present powerful marketing opportunities. An upswing in credit card or cell phone usage, the termination of automatic deposits, or the first instance of almost any type of behavior or transaction are behavior changes that savvy marketers could leverage if they knew about them.

Unfortunately, every company can list instances of losing customers at precisely the moment when they should be capitalizing on such an opportunity. Some of those customers get lured away by better deals from the competition. Others are dissatisfied with some aspect of price or service and begin shopping around on their own. Consider, for example, an airline that fails to notice a valuable customer’s increased travel schedule and loses his or her business when a competing carrier offers the customer a travel award promotion. Or perhaps an online retailer misses that a customer who normally shops for housewares is spending time in electronics comparing flat screen TVs – and so never makes them an offer that can close the deal.

Teradata EBM solutions change the ending to those all too common stories. You’ll use timely and reliable data analysis to anticipate your customers’ needs. If you’re an airline, you might offer your passenger free upgrades to first class and bonus miles shortly into his new travel schedule. If you’re a retailer, you might send a targeted email that offers free shipping on a flat screen TV purchase.

Teradata EBM solutions offer three key advantages over traditional marketing programs:

• Significance – Detect events or behaviors that are unusual (or significant) for each individual.
• Relevance – Deliver a message or offer that is highly personalized and relevant to this particular individual.
• Timeliness – Deliver the offer automatically and quickly (typically within 24-48 hours), reducing missed opportunities and significantly increasing the probability of acceptance.
  
  
  

These three qualities help you build stronger, service-based relationships and position yourself as a valued resource. Consider how this works in a variety of settings:

• A call center agent could have the authority and information to proactively offer a lower credit card interest rate to a qualified customer who has shown signs of shopping for a new card.
• A cell phone carrier could automatically notify a customer of a better rate plan when she has exceeded her plan minutes two months in a row.
• Financial institutions could proactively contact a retirement-age customer about a reverse mortgage when his direct deposit suddenly stops.
• Health insurance companies could recognize people diagnosed with a particular illness, such as diabetes, and automatically generate helpful materials and set up a personal case worker to support them.

In short, Teradata EBM narrows the scope of contacts with customers and prospects to only those times when they have demonstrated a need or unveiled an opportunity. This reduces the use of costly and irrelevant communications and consistently achieves much higher response and conversion rates than traditional marketing campaigns.

In fact, effectively implemented, Teradata EBM ensures value in every interaction. It can even be useful in detecting fraudulent activity and highlighting internal process improvement opportunities, such as establishing a procedure for following up on customer complaints with a phone call and pertinent offer within 24 hours.

The challenge is that detecting relevant behaviors and events and then executing timely and relevant communications requires special tools and processes, as well as extraordinary performance and scalability.

It is not enough to just identify a few transactions through a pre-defined set of rules. Such simple events offer limited value because they are focused on a single point in time (e.g., How many people purchased a product last month?) and don’t look at the overall customer relationship. You obtain much greater value by analyzing a range of transactions and interactions, in the context of key demographic characteristics that determine significance or historical data that can reveal behavioral trends. You then capitalize on that value with a system that can quickly and automatically generate a relevant offer.

That’s why an effective EBM tool must be able to:

• Trawl through hundreds of thousands or even millions of detailed transactions and interactions that are captured and evaluated at least daily.
• Identify/recognize behavioral changes, both simple and complex.
• Determine the significance of the behavior based on that customer’s transaction and interaction history.
• Select the best offer by prioritizing all potential offers for that customer.
• Validate against communication limiting rules, assuring that customers are not contacted too frequently despite exhibiting multiple identified behaviors.

• Determine the best channel for the communication based on customer preference and/or organizational constraints, such as channel cost or capacity.

• Personalize the message/offer for this specific individual.

• Simultaneously execute, manage, and measure hundreds of “event driven” campaigns every day.

Teradata EBM solution does all that and more. While it often starts with a relatively simple set of event rules and only a few events, we also have a uniquely powerful database and tools that facilitate the evaluation of millions of transactions per day and simple management of hundreds of simultaneous events. The combination has allowed our customers to each day identify and process the significant opportunities in near real time and generate personalized communications that garner measurable results.

In addition, based on engagements worldwide over more than a decade, we have developed a proven methodology that not only is effective and measurable, but can be simple and cost-effective to implement. Teradata Professional Services Consultants provide thought leadership and have access to best practices and tools such as:

• Innovative benchmarking, exploration, and prototyping workshops designed to help you identify and qualify the value of EBM using data and events that are unique to your business.
• A centrally maintained library of more than 1000 events for multiple industries, collected from a global knowledge base.
• Detailed processes for defining, developing, and running customer-focused event-based campaigns within a multi-business unit environment.
• Extensible data models that support new event design without data model changes.
• A proven methodology for EBM implementation.

Other companies talk about Event-Based Marketing, but no one has more experience or success with EBM than Teradata. We offer references from recognized industry leaders who have achieved actual results with simple and complex events, and we’ve been doing it for these top companies for more than a decade.

If your organization manages large numbers of transactions and/or interactions with customers, if you operate in a highly competitive industry where success depends on top-notch customer service, if increasing the range of products and services you offer is critical to growing your customer base – then you need to explore Teradata Event-Based Marketing. It will differentiate you from your competition and offer real, recognizable value to your customers.

For more information about an exploratory workshop, contact your Teradata representative.