It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Customer centric, customer first, relationship focused—no matter how you describe it, smart businesses know that keeping existing customers happy is important for their bottom line.
Consumers today have more power than they ever have. In a matter of seconds they can find information about any product, instantly see see what features are available at what price point, and compare it to others just like it. They can even find reviews about these products and the different marketplaces offering them. This truly is the age of the customer.
So how are companies keeping pace with such a discerning crowd? Data. Forrester Research has found those who are in tune with their customers will thrive. 50 years ago, companies on the Fortune 500 list could expect to last about 75 years—today only 12% of those original Fortune 500 giants remain. And 52% have disappeared just since 2000.
In this new landscape, where understanding the customer is everything, companies that are succeeding are engaging every employee to actively mine their company data for insights. What better way to understand the customer, than by deploying all of your best resources to understand their behaviors?
Getting a Sense for the Bigger Picture
Sterling National Bank is one such company embracing the relationship-focused approach with its customers. This New York community bank’s goal is to be the one go-to banking resource for their customer’s commercial and personal needs. And so, as they took on this charge, it became clear that everyone in the company needed more access, faster to customer data—including portfolio mix, account history, profile details, and account activity. With insight into customer behavior, the marketing team could run more effective campaigns, and relationship managers could deliver more personalized support.
Unfortunately, in order to get to their data, the organization relied on a team of BI analysts to build standardized BI reports using Cognos. These reports left most users with limited visibility, and often created more questions, which had to be sent back to the BI team and meant another week of waiting.
Using Search to Discover Insights
Sterling National Bank needed to address this bottleneck. In a recent webinar, “Put Your Data to Work with Search-Driven Analytics,” Sterling National’s SVP of Business Intelligence Patrick DeKenipp explained, “It’s critical for our relationship managers and our market directors and executives to understand the different channels and different points at which [customers] engage the bank—whether it’s online or whether it’s through financial centers.”
The bank turned to ThoughtSpot. With search-driven analytics anyone can use the search bar to quickly analyze data and build their own reports and dashboards. They are using ThoughtSpot’s Relational Search technology to blend marketing, sales and customer data, so that anyone can search across to discover answers to specific ad hoc reporting questions or customer behavior trends.
Patrick’s decision to bring on ThoughtSpot was in line with the bank’s goals of being customer-focused. “We’re taking an agile approach. We have a number of different data sets…[And] ThoughtSpot gives us the ability to provide users with information so they can answer their next question, on their own directly within the platform.”
The Complete Customer View
Since adopting ThoughtSpot, the bank has seen a 230% increase in analytics usage across the organization. Once people found how easy it was to build their own reports and search through the data, they began asking the “next” question. Reports that previously took two weeks to deliver, are now built in minutes.
Sterling National Bank knew it was critical to give end users with intimate knowledge of the programs they run the visibility they needed to make data-driven decisions. And with a better understanding of how their customers are behaving, teams are finding more effective ways to sell and manage product lines.
Teams across Sterling National Bank have a complete view of their customers—the products they’re buying, how they’re using them, as well as other spend behavior patterns. Marketing is using search to analyze deposit and loan growth across specific regions. They’ve established accurate benchmarks, and are identify opportunities for special promotions. Relationship managers are searching transaction data, portfolio mix, or account history to identify products for cross-sell and up-sell.
For more of Patrick’s insights into how Sterling National rolled ThoughtSpot out to the organization, his three lessons learned from implementation, and how Sterling National Bank plans to extend its customer focus with a portal approach, check out the on-demand webinar.
