BUSINESS PROBLEM
An industry leading airline company was working with a dated campaign management software system, using a version that was no longer being supported by the software vendor. Compounding their outbound marketing issues, their campaigns constantly changed ownership, their historical campaign data was not being captured accurately and there were all too frequent marketing operation issues. They were ready to take a fresh look at their marketing ‘wants & needs’ and align them with a more current version of Unica software to incorporate some of the industry’s newer functionality - enhancing their marketing organizations capabilities while providing a solid foundation for future growth and flexibility.
CLIENT PAIN POINTS
1) Lacked Governance, Standardization and Best Practices The marketing department had continuously evolved from the time the campaign management system was originally implemented. Over time, marketing campaigns had changed owners with each new one adding their own code. These layered campaigns were always being executed, but the reasons for some of the coding were not always understood especially since many business rules had changed over time. The situation was further intensified by different coding interpretations of specific global business rules that were not consistent across campaigns, nor documented, eventually resulting in the loss of potential contacts from some campaigns. | 2) Inaccurate and Incomplete Campaign System of Record In their old campaigning process they were not accurately capturing a historic record of all of the marketing touches a customer received. This led to an internal misrepresentation of how often customers were being contacted (we discovered they were losing track of as many as 25% of their marketing touches!). In addition, because the loading of the contact history records was a manual, multi-step process it was not uncommon to have some issues while trying to load the data. These loading issues resulted in loosing valuable time to identify the problem and fix it so the records could be loaded into the database. | 3) Poor Application Administration and Contact Management From the manual file processing and the build-up of old and historical marketing campaigns, there was a perpetual accumulation of files on the marketing application server to the point where it needed to be frequently cleaned up so the current run of marketing campaigns could process uninterrupted (and create more files). The file structure was over-personalized and redundant leading to operational delays in locating, using and deleting files. |
THE SOLUTION
Covalent Marketing did a complete upgrade, using our experience based campaign management project delivery methodology and best practices. We re-evaluated their marketing processes and subsequently:
1) Added/ Implemented new automated marketing capabilities - Making it less labor intensive 2) Standardized, templated, and centralized global and frequently reused business processes - Encouraging consistency 3) Streamlined their contact history process removing old trouble spots - Improving data accuracy | 4) Evaluated, reorganized and removed old files and scripts - Freeing up disk space, making a logical folder hierarchy 5) Enhanced their marketing measurement capabilities - Helping close the database marketing loop |
BUSINESS RESULTS
As a result of the upgrade, the client gained a much more efficient marketing operation.
Their campaigns are fully documented and use several marketing best practices – and those marketing campaigns that Covalent Marketing built have execution times that run up to 35% faster, saving hours of processing time!
They can now swiftly and correctly log their outbound marketing touches directly from an automated process built in to the campaign management tool giving them a precise, 100% accurate historical view of their past marketing efforts.
Eliminated inefficiencies around file and script management.
And with some forward thinking Covalent Marketing was able to set the table for them to upgrade/enhanced their reporting capabilities for when the time comes.