Customer Engagement & MarTech

At last: The starting shot for digitization strategy has been fired, and marketing is meant to be an important component of this strategy. In the course of implementation, a decision was made to use a customer data platform (CDP) to form a 360-degree customer view and automate marketing journeys in a real-time environment. This decision, in addition to an investment which is not small, has significantly influenced marketing processes and areas (online, e-mail, e-commerce and CRM) at an enterprise. In this third and last part of my CDP-series I would like to focus on the appropriate selection and evaluation of the suitable CDP-tool.

Unlike marketing automation solutions, a distinction is made not according to functional scope such as enterprise or best-of-breed, but according to the customer data platform's functional focus. In other words, the right kind of CDP can be selected already in advance, depending on how requirements are defined.

A total of three categories of customer data platform are distinguishable:

• Data CDP
• Analytics
• Engagement CDP

For many businesses, cross- and up-selling are among the most important objectives in customer management.When a customer calls a business, it seems to be the perfect time for cross- or up-selling activities.

• May any incoming call therefore equally be seen as potential for cross- and up-selling?
• And may cross- and up-selling also be successful if the customer has actually called in order to complain?
• Does success depend on how long the customer had to wait in the loop?

The Right Offer for the Right Customer at the Perfect Time

NBA meets NBA

A successful team in the American Basketball League NBA combines four crucial characteristics:

• the ability to work in a team
• scoring
• inspiration
• passing the ball to one another

But what does that have to do with the technical concept next best activity (NBA)? This question was discussed with the participants in the course of a workshop at the Call Center Association (Call Center Verband) Spring Conference 2013. The challenges for the implementation of an NBA concept were specifically identified and ideas for solutions were developed.

In order to successfully implement a campaign, it is important to be able to rely to a closed campaign planning process within the business. In case there is no such defined and uniform process, valuable potential is wasted and there is a risk that there will not be successes in the long term.

With the help of the workflow component of an MRM solution, marketers create tasks and can assign and control them to themselves or others.This makes timings, responsibilities and the processing status of tasks and campaigns recognizable, filterable and controllable at a glance.

Starting Situation

Isolated applications which make a standardization of processes impossible can be found in tool landscapes of media forecasting with regional focus. The media types often require specific budget allocation tools, availability checks and booking of placements for their forecasting. The forecasting results are manually transferred and checked for target group acceptance and visually prepared via a geo-information system (GIS). All outputs are subsequently exported separately in Excel format, manually compiled and formatted to the customer's CI - on request, this is also implemented in PowerPoint. If a customer feedback results in an adjustment, the process is repeated.

These factors cause both manual processes and a high coordination and communication effort in the interaction of customer consultant, media planner, creative agencies and the advertising customer - this results in inefficiencies and high processing costs for all involved parties.

This situation is the starting point of an optimization project regarding the implementation of a marketing resource management system (MRM) at a leading German media agency. Together with its sister companies, it is the fundamental element within one of the largest forecasting and purchasing agency networks worldwide.

Starting Situation

Cross- and up-selling in the call center are long-established methods to make additional profits. However, the increase in turnover due to cross-selling should not be detrimental to the service level.

Starting Situation

A customer operating in the financial sector has been using a proprietary CI tool for conducting direct marketing campaigns for some time. This has been tailored to the individual needs of the client over the years and constantly updated. However, as the requirements posed on the solution by the department have grown disproportionately over time, the proprietary development did not meet the latest requirement analysis of the department.

In an internal project, it was e.g. determined that the user interfaces can no longer be expanded with reasonable effort. Thus, as a result of the requirement analysis, it was resolved to replace the proprietary development with a new, external and sustainable campaign management solution. Accordingly, b.telligent was retained in order to conduct an evaluation of external campaign management solutions within a fixed time period.