A Pioneering, Custom-Designed Solution In A Single Month
“The perfect solution, and one that could continue to positively impact our client’s business in incredible ways, delivered in rapid time.”
Situation
Within the retail financial services sphere, prompt and accurate feedback is king. If a program or campaign isn’t resonating with its audience, the issue needs to be identified quickly and resolved effectively. And the success of program and campaign amendments rests on an organization having access to the data that will facilitate good decisions – the information to know what changes to make, and when and how to make them.
Our client is a loyalty marketing solutions provider worth over $400 million whose largest customer, one such retail financial services firm, was crying out for access to just this sort of information. And when we say, ‘crying out’, we’re not using editorial license – the firm needed a solution to be researched, designed, constructed and delivered in just one month.
So we at CSG were called upon to help.
The Problem? The firm was driven by a desire to make better decisions regarding the program benefits (including campaigns) that they were providing to participants. They were desperate for ‘on-demand’ program and campaign data, as well as a flexible means to view it. The expectation was that access to this information would result in end participants increasing usage of their customers’ credit cards.
Our client’s existing system of generating, tracking and viewing key loyalty marketing program KPIs and other metrics was perhaps best described as outdated, and at worst described as archaic. It took them no less than one week of every month to accumulate the necessary data, and present it to their retail financial services customer in the most rudimentary form available – as tables and graphs on a basic spreadsheet.
But perhaps the most troubling aspect of this system was the information itself. It was entirely static. With the data taking a week to collect and deliver, much of the information that the firm so relied upon to direct its decision-making was already out of date by the time it made it to the appropriate eyeballs.
Our client needed help, and needed it fast. The retail financial services firm was requesting that our client deliver them a solution capable of providing program and campaign data and visualizations online and in real time, and that it be delivered and implemented within one month.
Solution
Our client asked us to build it, and so we did. Over the course of the next month, we constructed an entirely custom and customer-specific solution that not only solved the problems outlined above, but also offered the client the foundation necessary to develop the solution into the future, to not just meet but exceed the continually evolving expectations of their biggest customer.
First, we studied the customer environment, identifying and extracting data that had proven inaccessible when utilizing the existing system. This helped us to better understand the weaknesses of the current methods, and how our solution might be able to further add value.
We then structured a solution that was able to accumulate and contain all relevant data, and that featured a data visualization and dashboard tool that facilitated viewing and analysis flexibility. We also designed dashboards for initially desired analyses and provided information access and analysis capabilities to targeted customer business functions.
The resulting solution was not just one that met our client’s (and their customer’s) need, but also laid the foundation for a future predictive-analysis offering that will give our client the opportunity to evolve the solution in-line with the inevitable demands for ever more intelligent and functional tech.
And all of this was delivered in the incredibly tight timeframe outlined above – just one month.
Result
Once the solution was implemented, our client was able to provide their retail financial services customer with analyses of program and campaign outcomes that were far more rapid and valuable than they’d offered before.
The solution allowed initially designed analyses and dashboards to update automatically – the laborious week-long ordeal of accumulating and presenting data was all but done away with, replaced by a solution that could do the same work autonomously and almost instantaneously. The resources necessary to complete the same amount of work, both in terms of time and expense, were dramatically reduced.
The solution afforded the financial services firm the ability to design and forecast program and campaign results in a more efficient, effective and enlightened way than ever before.
And the benefits are unlikely to start and finish with the one retail financial services customer. The solution provided our client with a pilot for offering deeper analysis – including predictive analytics – to other loyalty customers. What began as an urgent search for a solution could well serve as a template for our client to improve its service to every one of its customers.
The perfect solution, and one that could continue to positively impact our client’s business in incredible ways, delivered in rapid time.
