Customers crave consistent experiences that are personal, relevant, and timely. And customers interact with brands through many channels that are always changing and evolving.
This means many moving pieces that need to come together correctly to drive loyalty.
“The challenge is we don’t operate in a consistent manner,” said Susan Quinn, principal solutions architect at SAS. “We operate in silos, and don’t share data or strategies, or coordinate.”
Tuesday’s webinar, “Improving Customer Experience and Loyalty through Real-Time Marketing,” hosted by Loyalty360 and presented by SAS and Advance America, focused on the necessity of a central hub to coordinate and prioritize interactions.
According to Quinn, the technology behind real-time marketing provides that central hub, allowing customers to trigger a decision manager to tell the respective channel how to treat that customer. This is based on a series of analytics that deliver an optimized communication solution within seconds.
“Real-time decisions allow a company to establish rules of engagement,” Quinn said. “You can make sure the communication is relevant and customized.”
Advance America and real-time technology
Advance America, the largest non-bank provider of cash advance and short-term lending services in the US, was able to successfully implement real-time technology that resulted in a 97% customer satisfaction rating.
During the webinar, John Lodmell, Director of Credit and Data Analytics at Advance America, explained their challenges before leveraging real-time technology. With over 2500 lending centers across the nation, Lodmell said that a big priority is making sure these centers are connected and offers are coordinated across the board. These offers also need to be in line with business goals and foster loyalty.
“We are dealing with people who don’t have good credit, and they are used to hearing no a lot,” Lodmell said. “It is important to us in how we approach this – how do we find ways to say yes? We needed to be consistent in our lending decisions.”
This is where real-time analytics came in.
Reaping benefits from real-time decisions
Lodmell explained that their old decision system, while it served a purpose, couldn’t adapt and provide smarter and better solutions. Implementing real-time decision making software through SAS allowed them to have a centralized hub through which all customer decisions and data filtered through.
Real-time decision making allowed Advance America to have decision tree paths based on customer history and other data, firing back solutions for customized offers, treatment, and strategy. In addition, ownership of decision strategy was pushed away from the IT department to the credit risks and analytics department, which also optimized the decision tree. Lodmell said their stores are now making about 20,000 decisions a day through real-time decision making.
According to Lodmell, the biggest challenge in implementing the analytics was organizing the data.
“The biggest technical obstacle was getting all of the connections configured and making sure we knew how to store all of the data,” he said. “It was very important to be able to explain what happened, how we got that decision, and where the information came from. It was not a hardware obstacle, but how all those pieces tie together and how we manage that data.”
And when it comes to fostering loyalty, the lending solutions that Advance America is now able to provide make customers remember them for future lending needs.
“The customers we serve are not used to being told yes very often,” Lodmell said. “But we create that satisfaction by trying to find ways to say yes and work with them. This builds up tremendous loyalty. They remember – when we didn’t know who they were, we tried to find a way to say yes, and they come back.”