In every line of business, marketing professionals have to bring real value to the organization. They are expected to immediately respond to the ever-changing market, customer needs and competitor tactics. They need to extract their customer´s untapped business potential. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to have a clear marketing strategy that will enable to reach the customers and measure the impact of actions while striving for continuous improvement.
The definition of the marketing strategy is the most important milestone in the accomplishment of business growth.
- Do you want to increase customer retention?
- Do you want to leverage up-sell opportunities?
- What are the optimal guidelines for cross-sell?
If we assume that retention is critical for the fulfillment of revenue goals as it is the case in the Telco or the utilities industry; it is of vast importance to first identify the critical events in the customer lifecycle that require immediate response & the most effective offer that can be made at that point in time while drawing a comparison with the current market.
In order to support such processes, it is a necessary to have a flexible and easy to use platform that provides real insight about customers in order to enable marketing professionals to create offers, present them to the right customer at the right time and to analyze them.
SAP Real Time Offer Management (RTOM) designed to target those exact challenges. The following business scenario from the Telco industry demonstrates this:
The marketing department´s assumption is that high risk customers are the ones that have less than 6 months before the end of their contract. They also assume that customers with higher than average complaint rate, are the ones who are most likely to choose a different vendor. The moment of action should be the next interaction with that high risk customer. It can be via the web site, a mobile application, interaction center or any other channel.
There are several different business scenarios that must be evaluated in real time in order to achieve customer retention. During the interaction with the customer, RTOM will take into account the status of the customer´s contract, its lifetime value to the company, previous applications and complaints as well as additional information from other sources that may support decision making. All this information is combined with the experience RTOM gains from using advanced learning algorithms. The result will be an offer the customer is most likely going to accept; the limited interaction time is utilized to provide a highly relevant and targeted offer that will not compromise the revenue target.
In another business scenario, an online book store has identified that most of its web site traffic occurs on weekends. Special promotions were budgeted and now it is up to the marketing professional to decide how to use the budget most effectively. The strategy is to increase revenue by driving customers to spend at least 25$ when they are visiting the web site on the weekends. The incentive can be given in the form of free shipment or gift cards. Another possible approach can be to grant higher value cards to customers who are far from the target of 25$ in order to encourage them to add more items to their list. When a customer will browse the web site, RTOM will analyze the current shopping basket value and propose the best offer based on the learning experience and the business goals.
From my experience in RTOM implementation, the most important part is performing business analysis that will enable the organization to achieve real business value by utilizing RTOM´s unique capabilities. RTOM should target the business user´s needs and support them during their day to day marketing activities as one of the most powerful tools in their hands. The technical integration with the current IT landscape is accomplished by using RTOM flexible API and user exits methodology. The next post will demonstrate this up-sell offer creation in RTOM.
Find out more about RTOM in Value Plus web site www.valueplus.co.il
