A recent incident where one of my colleagues gets a phone call from one of the leading general insurers in India and, the telemarketer ensures to gain my colleague’ attention and engages him in a chit-chat on phone for over 20 odd minutes. Gotten convinced with the marketing offer, my colleague was ready to buy the product under one condition – i.e., like most of us, asks the telemarketers to papers and an agent (read Human Being) to meet to furnish the details and subsequently process the policy.

This one simple but yet very important condition to any consumer lead to another 20 mins of dialogue and at the end, the telemarketer settles for take-it-or-leave-it-now attitude. Its so sad to witness this – The insurer almost won a new customer and lost at the same time for an obvious process failure which leads to substantial notional loss.

Automating various aspects of marketing process is considerably easy with some consistent effort, this however assumes the underlying strategies/processes are intact with an ongoing sustained effort from the management and other key stakeholders of the Business.

The equivalent business aspect I can think of is Retail Banks discouraging customers to visit the Branches. For example, to deposit funds into an account, some Banks levy a fee if the monies were to deposited through the teller counter in the Branch. Wherein, if the same thing is done via the ATM is totally free – Note, the Banks are moving a transaction to a cost effective channel, not managing customer acquisition.

The reason for the letdown from the tele-marketer is very simple, the insurer hires an external telemarketing service provider and has a seemingly tight SLA (Service Level Agreement) that states commissions/revenue for the telemarketer would be based on converted sales through telephonic offers only and not worries to amend the agreement on aspects of passing on the lead to the insurer – This is so supremely absurd!

I understand the value of customer acquisition through cost-effective channels, but with some substance beneath and not with an industry like insurance which is so nascent on market penetration levels and every insurer is doing the best to win customer.

To any business customer acquisition is a very critical aspect and its essential its dealt with uttermost care – Insurers or any business for that matter cannot just afford to miss a customer just because he/she cannot buy a product via the telephone.

Oh! My dear Marketers, are you listening?

Pretty much everyone in marketing space I have spoken to in the last month of two have mentioned budget cuts for the forthcoming year without any adjustment around returns expected, and incidentally the aforementioned folks were talking about approaches to optimize the budget in an effective fashion.

The situation reminds of the old-but-still-relevant saying “need is the mother of all invention”

Barring the fundamental issues around economic downturn, a telco operator in Australia is kind of insulated. Please read Vodafone Australia – Marketing Optimization to know more.

What is Marketing Optimization (MO)?

In a nutshell, MO translates marketing challenges/problems/issues into mathematical equation and recommends approaches to meet the optimized objectives – This is either reduced cost or increased returns.

Interestingly, to leverage the value from marketing optimization, you don’t need to have doctorate in Statistics or need to be technically savvy – Business team with basis understanding of Statistics and Computers would be able to comfortably reap the value. After all, we are using technology to solve business problem, and the solutions are built keeping this in mind.

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Business Intelligence growing at a very high pace, knowing these a host of software professional comes together and mushroom out a myriad of software solutions in the market, in the process the poor evaluators and decisions makers at various enterprises go through the turmoil of getting stuck in the cobweb of information and struggle to make the right decisions. The idea behind this post is bounce of some ideas and approaches that are software solution agonistic but totally relevant from business perceptive.

Many folks I have dealt with have this common misconception about Business Intelligence, they think/believe ability to be able to report basis historical data in various forms such as drillable OLAP cubes, KPI driven dashboards, building a Pivot in excel are all business intelligence. As a starter, it ain’t really Business Intelligence! If you insist for a term for this, I would say ‘Historical Business Reporting’

The analogy I give to folk that believe the aforesaid definition is true is the following, “Running any business basis Business Intelligence that is believed to have a comprehensive set of capabilities to report on historical data, is like driving a car with a really huge rear view mirror and no (or keyhole) size windshield to look ahead”

If you believe (request you should, we practitioners are ready to help you) in the value that a true Business Intelligence can bring to your business, please do start with sketching out what are the Business Specific Values you would want to derive out of the Solution.

• In almost all the solutions’ case what goes in determines what gets out. So, if your data is not good enough, don’t expect anything good in return. This means, you might want to ensure the BI solution you are considering has the capability to manage Data Quality effectively.
• In addition to the cleansed data, we need to have access to behavioral analysis of underlying data and predicted future as well, for this we need the power of statistics – In absence of this approach, you will be driving the car (business) like the man in the illustration
• Basis the above two points, we are ready to represent the Information derived (from the cleansed and statistically analyzed data).
• Now, we must be able to present this data to aid various stakeholders make timely informed decisions. Basis their persona/profile, we need to decide how summarized or detailed the data should be.
• In the process of the presenting the data to end-users, we must ensure they are equipped with a through WHAT-IF capability to perform right kind of analysis in addition to accessing reports.

Business Intelligence solutions that has the aforesaid flow would assist you in not only meeting your short-term goals but the long-term objectives as well. Do talk to us, we are waiting to hear your perspectives..

In the last five odd years, whenever I have presented strategies and recommendations for customer management, enterprises I have worked with often requested us to build a strategy without having to relook into the customer data.

Organizations that played the Data Warehousing Game in the last half-decade without attaching tangible and intangible roles of the warehouse are too skeptical to give the deserved importance to look at the customer data for tangible values – In my opinion, warehouse Solution vendors and importantly some Enterprise Marketing Management Solution vendors are one of the key stake-holders to blame for this.

Amidst of meeting their quarterly figures, they went on a binge to sell software licenses without bothering to address the true needs of Customer Management.

I always requested the enterprises that consider walking the warehouse pathway, to hold their horses before boarding the bandwagon and think over how warehoused data would assist them in making meaningful business decisions, which touches either the top or bottom line of the business. Likewise, urged enterprises to be cautious to deal with Enterprise Marketing Management Solution vendors without adequate Customer Data Management Capabilities.

Sure, you already have substantial data that can be leveraged in customer management but not without some massaging – Fact is, the data that you have as is might not provide value it ought to in customer management, you definitely have to prune it a bit to realize its unseen potential in business.

Always, I repeat, always evaluate how the Customer or Enterprise Marketing Management solution you are considering handles the Customer Data – Firmly insist a demonstration of the solution’s capability around customer data management. In a warehouse scenario, proactively assess what you do once the data is organized in the warehouse pertaining to customer management and other business values it can provide.

In absence of this, you might end up automating some part of Customer Management, but it is surely not complete – Sad part in most of the cases is, you may not even realize the solution is incomplete.

In the world of effectice customer management, data management is one of the crucial steps and not to be ignored..

However, when it comes to solutions that are designed to address marketing requirements, it’s essential to look at them through a high-caliber magnifying glass. Why? Technology is relatively a new entrant to the marketing world and thus the solutions that are available in the market are not really matured, except for a couple of them.

In the last decade or so, a whole lot of software players mushroomed creating software solution for marketing management area. Needless to say, a few of these players have indeed good point-solutions, but the limitation is, most of them are a bit myopic in their offering.

To illustrate this in an example, one of the Campaign Management vendors in the world, got rather a decent solution for Campaign Management function, however, it does not have anything around Campaign Management Function to make it effective – A plain vanilla campaign management solution is nothing but a glorified SQL black-box that abstracts the raw code to the user, nevertheless, does nothing more than what an SQL query is expected to deliver. Any enterprise that is considering to invest in a technology solution would want to know the ROI it can bring to the table over a period of time, a plain vanilla solution would sooner or later fail the ROI litmus test.

As an enterprise when it comes to investing in a Marketing Management Solution, please do exercise some caution. Data Management, Customer Analytics, Channel Integration and Marketing Reporting are a few of the core ingredients of marketing function. You might want to consider investing in point-solution if you have existing investments in these areas.

But… Even if you do have existing investments, ensure you do not have any licensing and hardware sizing limitations to use the existing Data Management and Reporting area for marketing management function. In my experience, in most of the cases there is always a challenge to address around these areas. So, I would think its wiser for enterprises that are considering investing into a Marketing Management solution to evaluate the solution basis its width and depth of offering and not get awed by a few screens that resembles the wand of Ron Weasley.

Some enterprises consider going for a full-fledged best-of-breed approach to address marketing management requirements. Sure. But do note the following few words when you consider offerings from multiple vendors – Integration, Security, Metadata Management, User Management, Upgrades, Updates, Scalability… These factors will spring up when you look at multiple solution integration and will make you grow old, real fast.

If you liked this article and want to know on how to look at a marketing management solution, I urge you to visit Transcentis to know more. I would really appreciate if you can either send your comment for this article or contact to let me know your views/feedback.

Yet another case to add 55% of failed CRM cases. As a result of the failure, he is prone not to recommend anything pertaining to Customer Management to his official and social peers in an open way. Well, what is the idea behind this post?

The gentleman in the aforesaid story must have been one of those who must have fallen prey for one of the Campaign Management vendors that would impressed him and his team on user friendliness and ease-of-use of their software application. As a result to their sales discussion, they have forced him to get convinced on their offering as the end-of-all solution all challenges pertaining to customer management – Result? Substantial failure and another company helped the soaring CRM failures.

It is important to hold back for a moment and think….. Think what?

Please! Please! Please! Do not see Customer Management as an area in isolation, but as a part of the overall organization’ fabric and importantly part of the enterprise’ culture.

And, it is essential to look at Customer Management in totality NOT as one omnipotent software application. Please ensure the data that are to be managed from Customer Management perspective can be handled by the solution you are evaluating, it includes cleansing (if applicable) as well. Ensure, the constraint/limitation you have on storage does not have impact the Customer Management initiative. Ensure, in addition to accessibility to data, you have statistical analytical capabilities to be able to derive meaning out of all possible you may have. Ensure a campaign management application that is functionally rich and truly usable. Ensure, anything pertaining to Customer Management can be thoroughly report to various individual as various levels in the enterprise.

If you are one of those thinking of Customer Management, please do drop in a line-here with your thoughts.

In a nutshell, the aforesaid Article unearths some interesting facts around IT and Business Strategy alignment basis a research done Bain & Co. As you must have read, Organizations that have gone ahead with an accelerated IT focus have been proven to be performing better than those who are waiting for the D-Day for IT and Business Alignment – These are the folks who keep thinking its a perfect world, I really hope the statistics shown in the article rings the alarm.

Though the facts presented are interesting and rings a wake-up call for Enterprises that are hell-bent on alignment, it is important NOT to forget about the flexibility of the IT organization.

The industry that I work on i.e., Enterprise Marketing Management, solutions that are less than a decade old in age pose a huge threat on the Flexibility - To cite an example, there are a few Solutions available in the market that addresses ONLY the Campaign Management aspect of Marketing Automation. Campaign Management Solution in real-sense should be able to take Customer/Marketing Related data by means of accessing disparate systems and via through Web Services(to ensure its future ready) and be able to provide the output to relevant Communication Channels for engaging in dialogues with Customers and pull each communication’ response back for Analysis and Business Intelligence.

What I have presented above is just a Plain-Vanilla Campaign Management Solution, not the one you want to consider if you are ROI/Top-Line and Bottom-Line focused. If you are, give the deserved Importance to the Analytics aspect of Campaign Management.

Though this equation looks quite Commonsensical, a few enterprises have gone ahead and invested in such Plain-Vanilla solution as the Look ‘N Feel of the solution blown the Naïve Business Users away – Investments that are essentially made around the “WOW” factor of the User Interface alone, these investments are neither fruitful on a Long-term basis nor Flexible to accommodate future requirements/other Organizational needs.

Acknowledge the fact too-much-of-analysis-will-lead-to-paralysis and wisely accelerate your IT organization by keeping flexibility aspect intact and the solutions that you are investing in ready for future requirements.