Marketing and Sales

Sales Force E2E Advanced Analytics was a long-term engagement with the group in charge of sales and client management for both small businesses and middle market businesses at a major credit card issuer. DIA helped our client design, execute, and measure the impact of a comprehensive strategy that was effective at changing client behavior in a lasting way. The team focused first on defining overarching objectives and treatment strategies for different customer segments, coupled closely with incentive plan design so that sales representatives’ motivations were aligned with the organizational objectives. Then clients were selected and allocated geographically, and individual targets were created to match each representative’s client base. Additionally, DIA supported execution through production of monthly dashboard and call-planning tools, compensation calculation, and regular, high-level performance assessments to facilitate on-the-fly strategy adjustments. The project resulted in multi-billion dollar spend impact, and the expansion of the scope of the sales/client management program by more than four fold.

Designed a brand new Sales Incentive Plan for a phone-based acquisition team for card portfolio. The objective is to increase the incentives for acquiring higher-value customers and to distribute the payouts more evenly. We defined new benchmarks (such as customer spend in the first three months of tenure) and used them to set goals for each sales-person. We conducted extensive simulations to assess the potential impact. Since the new plan was adopted this acquisition team has proven to be able to ramp up spend much more quickly.

As part of this initiative DIA worked closely with the small business customer marketing organization, building an enhanced MIS and providing insights on strategy and execution for all marketing teams. We helped our client define the key KPIs, designed the reporting templates, developed processes for monthly updates and created an internal data environment for support. The audience included top executives as well as the marketing channel and initiative managers. When new initiatives launched we also helped to set up the testing and measurement plans. We tracked drivers of different types of marketing initiatives which explain the monthly results. We performed various analyse to identify immediate opportunities to drive more impact or close gaps. Another aspect of our work was to provide data-informed recommendations to refine strategy and facilitate execution. Our deep knowledge of the client organization and data enabled us to play a pivotal role in their business, contributing to the 40% year-over-year growth in incremental purchase volume

We were brought-in to redesign the email- and phone-based customer communications of a top US card issuer based on advanced models and Big Data machine learning techniques.

• Map-out customer preferences, interests and passions, and predict customer needs
• Pin-point the most relevant and compelling communication to customers through different marketing channels, e.g. phone, email, direct mail, and online.
• Provide customers a premium personalized service, improve their engagement and reduce attrition.

The team utilized big data techniques to collect and profile massive user and card offer/benefit features, and built a Recommender System using one of industry best practice recommender algorithms – Collaborative Filtering. Implemented card offer and benefit prioritization and personalization for customer service in phone channel and email channel. Improved the customer engagement with ~10% increase on offer acceptance rate in phone channel, and 30%-50% offer/message click through rate in email communications.

The focus of the engagement was to re-energize small business card portfolio acquisitions by leveraging commercial bureau data as a fundamental source (as opposed to consumer or vertical lists). We developed an end-to-end acquisitions decision engine and its multiple components, such as models (response, spend, risk), optimization logic and forward-looking customer value metrics. We also jump-started the implementation by setting-up the pilot campaign and production files. Overall, we increased Response-and-Approval by 70-110% on small business prospect base. We improved profitability (Gross Margin) by 80%. We were even asked to provide downstream support by facilitating the execution for a number of future campaigns (E2E campaign file creation).