What defines success? Imagine that your organization has decided to implement a real time marketing system to support a cross sell/upsell business case by intelligently interacting with its customers. As this is a hefty business and IT investment, the organization wants to spend the time and manpower to get everything as perfect as possible before going live to ensure that the return on investment is immediate. Your organization spends months perfecting the business rules and building the initial predictive models to drive the intelligent decisions of your real time marketing solution. The system is successfully deployed on time and under budget. This sounds like a successful implementation, right? Initial reports indicate that the marketing offers in the system are not effective and have a low rate of acceptance. Employees using the system complain that the system does not make recommendations for most customers. The delivery of the return on the original investment is delayed from 6 months to 3 years. Success is not just about going live with your marketing system. Using Continuous Improvement techniques, your organization can ensure that your real time marketing implementation provides an immense return on investment in a short time frame and is a true, long term success.
Deploy Quickly
Many organizations make the mistake of spending effort trying to perfect the system before launching (usually called a “Big Bang” approach). What these organizations fail to realize is that the system always changes drastically based on (customer and employee) feedback and learning during the pilot window of 1 to 3 months after go live. All the time and effort that the organization has spent in the initial project is wasted. An organization may find that their users do not actually use a function of the system as intended or that the customers react unexpectedly to a marketing offer.
A quick deployment (for phase one) is paramount. Organizations should spend less time to get the system live but spend the time and effort ensuring that appropriate data collection and feedback loops are in place to improve the system. Deploying with a pilot group (a subset of users), a subset of marketing offers, and slowly rolling out to all users reduces time to launch.
Input!
Time and effort should be spent on putting mechanisms in place to collect information and feedback once the system is live. This is then used to refine and improve the system. Too often reporting and simulation are not fully thought out and implemented. A proper reporting mechanism is the single most important tool in knowing how effective the marketing system is (example: tracking offer presentation through to fulfillment). Simulation is the only way to safely investigate performance and tune marketing offer performance without actually involving live customer interaction. Other techniques can be used to collect information such as rules monitoring (what rules are firing and when), user surveys, customer surveys, etc.
Remember that the goal is to:
- provide a feedback loop that collects information
- create a BAU (business as usual) process to apply the feedback as updates (during a reoccurring interval like monthly for example) to the real time marketing system
A Champion Rises
Before an organization deploys a real time marketing system for the first time, your team may notice that one member of the project team (direct member or indirect) really “gets” the advantages and identifies the wasted potential of a real time, inbound marketing system. They start asking tough questions as to why certain customer segments are being excluded (as they understand that these represent massive potential revenue streams) or question the justification of a retention strategy over single vs. multiple channels. The organization should recognize the value in this person and allow them to lead the effort to move the real time system from a “project” during the first release to become a “business as usual” process for all future releases. They become the champion that helps to fulfill all the promises (and create new opportunities) as envisioned in the original business case.
Organizations should spend as much or more effort ensuring continuous improvement than implementing their real time marketing system for the first time. This is the only way to ensure that the system is a success in the long run rather than just a single, successful deployment that was on time and within budget.
