Case Study Monday: Bringing Direct Marketing In-House

Welcome to another edition of Case Study Monday!

Today's case study is from Detica Information Intelligence, a specialty business and technology consultancy based in the United Kingdom. We think that this case study is an excellent example of how you can utilize an outside perspective to help you bring direct marketing functions back in-house. And, as this story illustrates, Detica helped their client do this while also contributing significantly to their bottom line. Read on for more insight into how Detica created a true win-win situation for their client.

Client name: A major international mobile phone service provider

Business challenge: Mobile phone service providers are facing increasingly tough competition in the UK. As one of the industry's global leaders, our client was therefore keen to adopt more flexible, cost effective ways of exploiting its customer intelligence and targeting its millions of UK subscribers with successful direct marketing campaigns. A key requirement was to develop a 'closed loop' system that could look intelligently at the success of past and current marketing initiatives, then feed this information into future plans to make them more effective. This would enable our client to target customers through a variety of channels, capture their responses, measure the outcome and 'close the loop' by incorporating the new intelligence into future promotional and communications programmes.

Detica Solution: Detica was engaged to manage the implementation of Chordiant Marketing Director™ software, assembling a team of data intelligence and business process analysts, plus project administration specialists, supported by product experts from Chordiant. This enabled us to transfer Marketing Director operations from an outside bureau to our client's UK in-house division - generating cost savings amounting to more than £5 million over 10 years. Once installed, we also integrated the software with a new customer database and a state-of-the-art suite of contact centre applications. Having successfully implemented the software, we continued to work with our client's UK marketing, customer service and IT teams to bring the entire 'closed loop' system into full operation. Detica also provided consultancy to help re-engineer its direct marketing business processes and to identify best practice for campaign managers.

Results: The end result has been an intelligent, integrated in-house solution that enables our client to plan, measure and execute direct marketing campaigns across multiple channels - whilst also generating cost savings in excess of £500,000 a year. This has increased its responsiveness to business opportunities and allows it to generate multi-media campaigns in shorter time frames. In addition, contact centre agents can now deliver direct marketing messages to help drive smart cross-selling, while still providing a core customer service function.

As a result, our client is operating its most efficient and measurable direct communications programmes to date - with plenty of scope to improve operations still further in the future. It also has a solid, intelligent information base that allows it to put together tighter and even more relevant promotions for its UK subscribers.

Congratulations to Detica for assisting their client in building more profitable customer relationships! This is something that we are truly passionate about and this is a great demonstration of one way to accomplish this desired outcome. The results gained were quite impressive and this story is something to keep in mind as you look at what to outsource and what to bring in-house in your own businesses.

Have a great week!