Summercall Case Studies

Database Marketing

      Prudential - Summercall developed a direct marketing centre of excellence within Prudential. This involves close liaison with the direct-to-consumer channel to ensure best practice direct marketing through all customer communication (mail, phone and web). They worked closely with creative and media agencies to ensure efficient planning of activity across all product areas and have developed the first Direct Channel MI reporting tool. This reporting template has now been adopted across the organisation. They also initiated an ongoing programme of testing and refining which ensures that the company is maximising cost effectiveness and response. As a result, Summercall have experience in marketing a number of specific products, including annuities, lifetime mortgages (or equity release), ISAs and personal pensions, as well as customer retention activity described below.

      Scottish Widows - As CRM Manager, Grant was responsible for utilising a data warehouse, containing in excess of 1 million policyholders, for customer contact both by mail and telephone. Significant savings in cost per sale were achieved through developing highly segmented and targeted contact lists which yielded much higher response rates than previous large scale mailings.

      Standard Life - Summercall were part of a project team that delivered campaign management and reporting functionality for the direct arm of the business. Summercall delivered a detailed data audit and data model based on the campaign management functionality.

Ramada Jarvis - Summercall are responsible for the targeting of all direct campaigns through various profiling and segmentation techniques.This also utilises the bespoke web-enabled marketing database which provides a single view of all customers and their activities.

      Stakis Hotels/Hilton Hotels - Grant developed the customer database and managed the successful transition of this into a full SAS data warehouse. This was recognised as the largest and most sophisticated in its sector at the time. Targeted mailings from this database returned an average return on investment of 15:1 and response rates to mailings of between 10% and 20% were not uncommon.

      Sky Television - Grant used the customer database to manage the company's telephony upsell and cross sell programmes. For up selling, customers were targeted to increase from a basic to a more expensive package, whereas the cross sell programme targeted customers with a propensity to purchase other channels that were not included in a general Sky package. These regularly outperformed sales targets and increased subscriber revenue by around 20%.

Proposition Development

     Prudential – Collective Investments: Summercall developed a number of different propositions for the Collective Investments part of the business. We worked closely with the Insight and Research teams to match customer needs to different segments and then researched the resulting propositions. These were then taken to live testing and subsequently roll-out in a champion/challenger strategy.

     Prudential – Customer Retention: we developed propositions for customer retention built around a value and risk segmentation model. This delivered a set of segmented treatment strategies depending on how valuable the customer was and their risk of attrition.

     Prudential – Contact Strategy: we were engaged in a major piece of work looking at a joined up customer journey from pensions, through annuities to lifetime mortgage. This has focused on a pension segmentation which prepares the different customer types for vesting into an annuity and then finally the purchase of a lifetime mortgage.

     Prudential – Online: Summercall were a key stakeholder in the redesign and rewrite of the existing customer website. This takes into account the customer journey for customer groups most likely to use the web as a channel of choice. It is delivering an interface where customers, for the first time, will have the ability to see a whole range of product information as well as relevant lifestage information, in one central place.

     Stakis Hotels - Grant was responsible for investigating, developing, negotiating and subsequently delivering joint marketing initiatives with third parties such as Tesco's, Royal Bank of Scotland and British Midland. These were aimed at increasing brand awareness as well as rewarding existing customers and giving them a further reason to choose Stakis the next time they booked a hotel. This was very important in this cluttered market space.

 

Data Mining and Analysis

  Ramada Jarvis -Using the marketing database described below, Summercall provide analysis of all leisure and corporate stay data. This includes bespoke and 'off the shelf' segmentation, customer profiles at individual property or market segment level, drivetime analysis from hotels and also customer maps to visually represent hotel catchment areas.

      Gleneagles Hotel - Summercall developed a practical and cost-effective customer segmentation solution for this market leading hotel brand. This has allowed the Gleneagles marketing department to utilise differentiated marketing strategies, depending on the customers value to the organisation - therefore saving budget by only targeting those customers most relevant to a particular treatment.

      Stakis Hotels/Hilton Hotels - Grant introduced data mining using various SAS tools and used this to provide MI, develop customer profiles and improve targeting for marketing campaigns. This was the first time that organisation had detailed insight of customer behaviour and was able to utilise it to drive increased business.

      Scottish Widows - Grant managed a team of five business analysts who used extensive data mining techniques and built various propensity models which were used to improve the targeting for customer contact. His team also developed the customer segmentation which was used to underpin the CRM strategy of contacting the right customer at the right time with the right message.

Retention

      Prudential - Summercall were contracted to head up the retention team for Customer Communications. This team are responsible for all retention activity - focussing on the legacy books which are at highest risk and have the highest value to the business. This involves increasing customer loyalty through implementing a number of different strategies from cross selling (based on a principle that a customer with multiple products is ‘stickier’), issuing reassurance messages to customers (particularly important in this current climate) and developing scripts for inbound and outbound telephony designed to make the customer feel good about having Prudential products.

We have built the customer journey for key products and mapped segmented sales and servicing approaches to each customer touchpoint. The retention work includes both proactive and reactive communications, delivered both by voice through telephony and through print material. Retention success is notoriously difficult to measure but we have put in place a range of MI which measure key shifts that are a direct result of the activity plans.

      Sky Television - Grant managed the internal call centre (280 heads) and outsource relationships (50 heads) responsible for delivering what was regarded as the best retention figures in the world for Pay TV. During his time at Sky, the churn figure was just 9.3% and a large part of this success was due to the inbound and outbound retention programmes.

CRM

      Prudential - In January 2005, Summercall were contracted to represent Prudential's marketing communications in a major multi-million pound project to develop a customer data warehouse and CRM functionality. This was successfully implemented in 2006 and included Chordiant Marketing Director, SPSS Clementine and Business Objects. All marketing contact across the organisation  is now done through this CRM solution.

    Ramada Jarvis -Summercall, in conjunction with an IT partner, built and manage the marketing database for Ramada Jarvis. Data from various source systems was matched, cleaned and enhanced to produce a customer-centric database. This includes all leisure, corporate and group bsiness. Access to this database is via a web server and therefore any employee of Ramada Jarvis throughout the UK is able to build querie, analyse data and produce mailing or email files.

      VisitScotland - In 2004, Summercall were invited to develop a CRM solution for VisitScotland. They successfully project managed this implementation through introducing a third party data and analysis bureau. The solution featured a web enabled Quadstone portal, giving all marketing users access for the first time to customer purchasing and response behaviours. This has been rolled out across VisitScotland and is the cornerstone to al customer communications.

In addition, Summercall wrote the e-crm strategy for VisitScotland and advised the marketing department on how to develop the wider e-business function. They were also closely involved in developing the e-business strategy which helped to define the role and functionality of visitscotland.com - a separately funded organisation which is the customer contact arm of VisitScotland.

      Scottish Widows - Grant was appointed to develop the company's CRM strategy and implement the subsequent programme. This involved working closely with a major consultancy to define the strategy, producing a single customer view from over 10 different legacy systems, choosing and implementing appropriate tools, close relationships with other departments and also selling the concept of CRM in at a very senior level.

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