CHAPTER 6· RELATIONSHIP MARKETING USING THE INTERNET
The new data environment was developed to facilitate all of those things. It also brings in external
data such as Experian’s Mosaic. ‘We have less information on new prospects, so we bought third party
data on every household – the type of house, the number of householders, status, risk, lifestyle data,
financial status, age, plus GIS coding’, he says.
For every customer, over 1000 fields of data are now held. These allow the bank to understand cus-
tomers’ product needs, profile, risk, loyalty, revenue and lifetime value. That required a very sophisticated
system. For every customer, there is also a whole bundle of statistical models, such as affinity for a prod-
uct and channel, profitability overall and by type of product.
‘These are calculated monthly so we can perform time-series analyses, so if their profitability is falling,
we can target a mailing to them’, says Fruehling. DataSmart has allowed Deutsche Bank to makes some
important changes in its marketing process, allowing it to operate more quickly and effectively.
‘We have a sales support system called BTV in our branches to communicate with each bank man-
ager. They can see the customer data and are able to add information, such as lists of customers who
should be part of a branch campaign, who to include or exclude, and response analyses’, he says.
Previously, typical marketing support activity involved segmenting and selecting customers, sending
these lists through BTV for veto by branch managers, making the final selection, then sending those lists
to BTV and the lettershop for production. ‘There were many disconnects in that process – we had no
campaign history, nothing was automated. Our programmers had to write SAS code for every selection,
which is not the best way to work. We had no event-driven campaigns’, says Fruehling.
An interface has been developed between PrimeVantage, BTV and each system supporting the seven key
channels to market. Now the database marketing unit simply selects a template for one of its output chan-
nels. This has allowed Deutsche Bank to become more targeted in its marketing activities, and also faster.
‘Regular selections are very important because local branches do our campaigns. We may have up
to 20 separate mailings per week for different channels. That is now much more profitable’, says
Fruehling. Customer surveys are a central part of the bank’s measurement culture and these have also
become much easier to run.
‘Every month we run a customer opinion poll on a sample of 10,000. Every customer is surveyed twice in
a year. That takes half a day to run, whereas previously it took one week and 30 people using SAS. If a cus-
tomer responds, their name is then suppressed, if they do not, they are called by the call centre’, he says.
The bank’s customer acquisition programme, called AKM, now uses up to 30 mailings per year with
as many as 12 different target groups and very complex selection criteria. ‘We flag customers using SAS
and PrimeVantage recognises those flags’, he says. ‘We are now looking to move to a higher communi-
cations frequency so every customer gets a relevant offer.’
Source: European Centre for Customer Strategies case study (www.eccs.uk.com), 2001Question
Summarise the data types that Deutsche Bank collects and how they are used for customer relation-
ship management.