Challenge: Efficiently retain and upsell customers.
Solution: Inform call-center agents about which offers will be relevant to which customers.
Results: A more than 20 percent increase in monthly orders generated by care-related calls.
What happened to Jerry Dow one day in a Suddenlink Communications call center is possibly the dream occurrence for every boss. A customer service representative, so grateful about how a software improvement he'd helped implement simplified the direct marketing process, hugged him.
"She said the MORE tool had helped her achieve her goals for the first time since she'd been employed at Suddenlink," recalls the St. Louis-based cable broadband company's chief marketing and sales officer, referring to Marketing Optimization and Recommendation Engine software from Framingham, Mass.-based marketing solutions provider Pluris.
What this representative experienced was an example of what Suddenlink had been seeing on a grander scale since automating its call-center inbound marketing program. After adding the marketing automation tool in fall 2008, Suddenlink saw a more than 20 percent increase in orders during its more than 500,000 monthly inbound calls.
Suddenlink has 1.3 million customers who dial in more than 6 million times a year. Although its business is primarily in the South, Suddenlink serves a diverse customer base in 19 states. Dow says he wanted to get away from tossing out a blanket offer every month and provide different consumers with different offers that were more applicable to their households and lifestyles.
After inputting data and getting the tool up and running in a little more than two months, Suddenlink's local marketing reps began putting offers into the system and Pluris started maintaining and hosting the system that is updated daily. (Customer information includes date of most recent purchase, payment history, service/trouble history, next most likely product to purchase, segment, likelihood to churn and lifetime value.)
Now when a customer service rep picks up the phone, she sees a suggested offer courtesy of the tool's pop-up message feature. The message is tailored to the customer based on behavior, demographics and predicted attitudes.
"I think all of us marketers are pretty good at inefficiently upselling customers," Dow says. "What this tool allows us to do is become far more efficient at rightsizing, upselling and cross-selling customers."
According to Dow, local marketing reps—
especially in competitive regions—also can add offers that can be as specific as one exclusive to customers in Lubbock, Texas.
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