At Aussie, BI will save you
At Aussie, BI will save you
Aussie Home Loans has gained a single view of its customers.
Non-bank lender Aussie Home Loans has managed to save its marketing staff time in compiling reports, and reap the benefits from more targeted marketing campaigns, as a result of a successful business intelligence software implementation.
In a time-consuming reporting process, marketing staff and analysts at Aussie Home Loans (Aussie) were working long hours collating, merging and cleansing data from a variety of transaction-based systems to provide customer analysis for marketing campaign development. Not only was the reporting method protracted, Aussie had to redevelop it every month to ensure the data was up to date.
Marketers used Microsoft Excel for reporting, which didn’t allow for complex queries and cross-analysis of data. Aussie had also developed a data warehouse to collect data from various sources from its CRM and transactional systems. However the data warehouse did not have an attached reporting and analysis tool, so reporting and customer lists had to come from the IT department.
In order to speed up its reporting time and better utilise customer details, Aussie implemented a BI tool from Brio Software. Aussie selected the Brio Intelligence product because of the software’s ability to query the data warehouse directly.
Emilio Gazis, senior manager of customer knowledge at Aussie Home Loans, said Brio Intelligence took just one month to implement, and the value the lender got from it immediately was “phenomenal”.
”Prior to Brio Intelligence and the data warehouse, we didn’t have a single view of our customers. We couldn’t analyse our customers based on all the products they were using. We had an idea of which customers fitted which profile - simply based on our loan account information - but as this is a fairly simplistic approach we knew we werenÕt getting a completely accurate picture,” he said.
Integrating Brio Intelligence with the data warehouse allowed marketing staff to better segment data about its customer base in order to develop targeted marketing campaigns. Aussie also purchased external geodemographic data to load into the data warehouse so users could do comprehensive reporting and pull customer lists from the database for marketing campaigns through an interface, without any involvement from the IT department.
Mr Gazis said it used to take two people to work for approximately one day per week to collect and collate customer data and get it in a form that was presentable before the Brio implementation.
”With Brio Intelligence as our front-end analysis tool, we rely on just one analyst to gather the information we need,” he said. “We’ve saved two person-days per week in providing the information we need.”
Resources in the IT department are also freed up from reporting duties, and can now focus on more technical issues.
”We can pull out lists of customers we want to target quickly and we don’t need IT input. IT input is valuable, but not having to wait in line for your turn means much faster turnaround times for us. Our market is so dynamic that we need to be able to respond to economic and environmental trends or events as they happen,” Mr Gazis said. In addition, the lender is planning future enhancements of its BI capabilities, including the delivery to management of a snapshot of Aussie’s customer base on a weekly basis in a dashboard-type format. Currently the executive team is updated on a monthly basis with hard copy reports, so Aussie expects the provision of an online facility updated weekly will be a huge improvement.
The sales management team will also be offered a dashboard application to analyse consultants’ performance and trends over time, resulting in better management and optimisation of sales regions and catchment areas.