Periscope (Formerly Anthem Marketing Solutions)

BACKGROUND

Could you give a brief description of your company?

We are a global Fortune 100 company with $13 billion in sales in 22 countries and we provide food and related work for businesses and sports venues.

What’s your role and responsibilities please?

I am the vice president of commerce for refreshment services. We are the largest office coffee provider in the United States. We’re about a $1 billion division. I run all the eCommerce and digital marketing for the division.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for the work with Anthem or the business challenge you were trying to address?

I have hired them twice for two different companies. This work is around finding the data and understanding what the data is telling us. We have two major studies with them. One is a full eCommerce analysis. We had 100,000 customers before I came on board. We came in and put in an eCommerce platform so that they could order online, and about 25 percent of them do currently.

Anthem is really trying to get into the data to understand incremental revenue from the platform and ordering habits. They want to make us more money. They are just trying to get under the data. This is one piece of their work.

Another piece is segmentation analysis for another person in the division, but not on my team. In that work, they tried to figure out what our best customers look like and what trends link this group. We want to figure out the best targets, and how to price our products to enhance revenue.

SOLUTION

Can you describe the scope of the work?

We didn’t really do training or support. I think they have SAS or some large package. For us, the output was analysis and reporting, and to a lesser extent, dashboards.

What was your process for selecting Anthem to work with?

I’ve known John [Anthem's vice president] for over 10 years. I worked with him in the 1980s. I knew that his company could do the work and I trusted him, too.

It wasn’t a formal request for proposal but I called him and a couple other firms whose names I can’t remember now. We selected them because they understood the industry. They seemed to have a better handle on it than anybody else.

Can you give us a sense of the size of the initiative in a dollar figure?

We spent six figures with them last year. We give them every line of data for 100,000 customers in millions of rows.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any stats or metrics to track improvement?

They accurately predicted what our growth in sales was because of the eCommerce conversion. A couple of the insights they had on segmentation, have helped increase sales between 5 and 10 percent.

How has Anthem performed so far?

I think they’re very bright guys. They’re some of the smartest in the business. Our internal team does not have the tool set or knowledge base to find these insights, so that’s when we turn to Anthem.

Is there anything unique or special that makes Anthem stand out compared to other vendors?

I can go to them with an unstructured question. They come back with some really neat insights about the business. They find hidden insights about customer loyalty and retention that we would never find. Usually, vendors don’t like unstructured questions, but Anthem can solve these issues without even charging us for all of the extra required work.

Our sales team also loves Anthem because they are more prepared for sales meetings and cold calls. They have all of the information that they need at their fingertips, it takes the guess work out of the sales process. This has led to more sales conversions as I mentioned before.

Do you have any improvements to suggest or anything that you think they could do differently?

No. I don’t know what I would tell them to do differently.

BACKGROUND

Could you give me a brief description of your company?

We are lawn care gardening company that sells products mainly for residential use. The products and services are mainly sold at retail centers. We sell lawn and garden products as well as service to residential homeowners, lawn care, lawn fertilization, that sort of thing.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m the Director of Analytics and Direct-to-Consumer Marketing. Essentially I have an internal team as well as several external partners that analyze and mine internal data sets as well as external data sets.

The purpose is for reporting for predictive modelling, forecasting for the business. We are trying to help leadership make decisions about the business.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was the business challenge that you were trying to address for the work with Anthem?

They do so much for us; on the direct-to-consumer side, mainly targeting our best neighborhoods and prospects. They built a neighborhood targeting model. They’ve helped us focus on our most profitable neighborhoods to sell the service and to offer the service and identify prospects that were high-value that if they became customers, would spend a lot of money.

 They would retain and they were also focused on density as customer density is a key factor in our profitability. That was a key piece along with our attrition modeling for current customers, predicting customer turn as well as being predictive in regards to who and when is going to cancel the service.

On the retail side, we focused on retail store clustering. We work big home and garden centers and home improvement centers all throughout the United States. They helped us categorize and cluster those stores in a segmentation study. They helped us identify opportunities for improvement and growth at the store level.

SOLUTION

Can you describe the project?

The tool development and helping us launch some tools internally that users can use either see kind of real-time insights on the business, was the main work.  There was a neighborhood targeting piece.

Anthem developed a mapping tool that helped our sales teams zero in on the right neighborhoods to focus acquisition efforts. Also on the retail side of the business, the tools helped end users understand the seasonality of our business. We examine together how it’s impacted by weather, real-time mapping tools or dashboards.

How did you select them to work with in the first place?

They were actually part of the organization before I got here. We were going through a transition on the service side of our business from one data provider to another and in the meantime we hired Anthem just to do the acquisition model for our service side of the business. We originally hired them for a very small piece of work and that was six or seven years ago.

Over the years, they just kept adding more value and they’ve earned a lot more business as a result. They’re now a single analytics arm for our service side of the business. They’re starting to play a bigger role in the retail side of the business and our direct-to-consumer side of the business. We hired them to build a model and from there it has grown.

Can you give us a sense of the size of their initiative with a dollar or work hour figure?

It seems to vary. We don’t have a real stringent relationship. They’re on a retainer so we pay them monthly and I think in the SOW, there’s FTEs or man hours broken out.  The total spend is around $2 million annually.

Has there been a recent milestone?

Probably the neighborhood modeling was the most recent piece that had the biggest impact on the business.

Was that rolled out recently?

Yeah, that would have been in the last 12 months.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How have they performed overall so far?

They would be an A student, if I were to grade them. They’re pretty vital to our business right now. We lean on them heavily.

Do you have any stats or metrics to track improvement after they’ve implemented their models?

ROI is a little difficult but several metrics as far as response to campaigns, direct marketing campaigns or acquisition response versus a control group on the retention side of the business for the service. We have seen a bump in our ability to keep customers that the models show which customers are going to cancel, again versus a control group. We can clearly show the value of each end of the jewel project or initiative that they’re a part of.

What’s really unique or special about Anthem compared to some other vendors you may have encountered?

I think their ability to throttle up and down based on the cadence of the business. Their understanding of the business, they get fully engrossed in the category. They knew nothing about our business or category when they first started with us. Now they’re literally some of our experts in the category. Their ability and desire to dive in or want to learn as much as they can about not only the business but the category more broadly is huge.

We’re a seasonal business, even though our work is pretty steady throughout the year, they have the ability or the foresight to throttle up the resources as needed. I assume they’re taking care of it on their end during a slow time to reallocate some resources. We never feel like we’re waiting for anything. They’re not nickel and diming you for additional resources during the high times. They just absorb that when they need to. You feel like you’re they’re only client and that they’re all-in when you need them.

Looking back on the work, do you think there is any area that they could improve upon or you would do differently?

I probably let them take on a few more projects than I should have. There were a few instances where they did work, it was great work, it just never got implemented in the business and that was mainly because of us.

We just didn’t take it and run with it. If I had to do it again, I probably would have told them to back off or not worry about it. Again, it’s not necessarily things we paid for. We never really pay anything above and beyond our retainers so all the work is included.

BACKGROUND

Could you give me a brief description of your company?

At that time, I worked for one of the largest cleaning service providers in the continental U.S. They have just over 200 franchises and around 75 corporate-owned branch locations in the U.S. They primarily conduct carpet cleaning, but they also do surface cleaning like hardwood, tiles, granite, etc.

What was your role and responsibilities?

I was the Consumer Insights Manager. I was responsible for linking data with the customer to understand the right person, right message, and right time in our marketing efforts.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was the business goal or challenge?

The company had a Legacy Database that had been collecting transactional information on their customers for more than 20 years, but it was only a living-breathing transactional database. They didn’t gain any user insights from the data.

There was historical information on customers, but it had never been aggregated together; there had never been data appended to it to understand demographics or behaviors. We really wanted to get to the root of that to understand who our customer was. 

We wanted to understand who our customer was, how to reach them, what their preferences were, and how to message them appropriately. We wanted a customized segmentation strategy within our customer database to make a profile similar to the market reality. 

SOLUTION

What was your process for selecting Anthem as your solution partner?

I distributed a number of RFPs. From colleagues in the Columbus Market that I had worked with prior that were doing similar projects, I had just got some advice as to who I should contact and they were part of an RFP process. I sent it to four firms and they impressed us the most.

Could you describe the scope of the project?

I would consider them an extension of the marketing department. They took what was a very messy, convoluted, old database system, and transformed that into a usable marketing database. They did all of the cleansing, hygiene, and matching. They created various groupings of customers with the historical legacy information. They performed the data transformations and they built all of the segmentation strategies. From what we learned from appending all of their proprietary data to our customer database, we were able to build nine unique segments of our customers. From there, they handled all of the modeling for each campaign. They helped determine who to target depending on what the goal of the campaign was. They're responsible for all of our direct mail campaigns. They also performed predictive modeling to understand who in the market we could hypothesize would have the same behaviors with our customers.

What technologies were used?

They used SAS software systems. They have an expansive staff composed of statisticians and analysts working with the platform and data.

Could you give me a sense of the size of that initiative in either monetary terms or personnel work hours?

I’m allowed to share financial information. We had about five people at Anthem that were devoted to our account. They were at our beck and call when we needed anything as far as ad-hoc projects because they didn’t just stick to their base analytics.

They also performed a significant amount of ad-hoc work for the company. The company was far behind as far as technology is concerned and we look to Anthem for trending, patterning and understanding basic information. This includes profit margins, process efficieny, etc. Anthem has been invaluable from the ad-hoc perspective. 

When was the last milestone or project completed?

I hired them in May, 2011. We had our first database analysis presented to us by that August. Segmentation was delivered to us by February of 2012. We then began to test the configured segmentations for our direct mail campaigns. The next piece required developing an e-mail drip campaign based on our segmentations. That last milestone was deployed in April.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Was the project successful?

Yes. It is probably the most successful vendor-partner relationship we’ve ever had in terms of our return on investment. 

Could you share any statistics or metrics that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work delivered?

Yes. Depending on the value of the customer base we were targeting, we were getting anywhere from a 2 to a 6 percent response rate on our direct mail campaigns.

How do you think Anthem performed on this project?

I’ve been doing this for approximately 13 years and they were probably one of the best vendors I’ve ever worked with as far as immersing themselves in our company. They invest the time to understand not only the customer but how the organization works, how all of the departments function together. They really immerse themselves into your day-to-day so they can accurately describe the customer better than an employee can.

Is there anything you would consider unique or special about Anthem as compared to other solution partners you've worked with in the past?

They don’t boilerplate anything. They really customize the solution to your predefined business needs.

In retrospect, are there any areas you believe Anthem could improve upon or that you might do different as the client before approaching this type of project?

I can’t think of anything. I can't share any negatives. They could have had more face-to-face time with the board and the executive leaders to help them understand better, but that's really on us. Their work was something so vastly different from anything we'd had seen before. Their predictive modeling and more sophisticated marketing practices were essential to us. They're able to balance their wide range of capabilities with the responsiveness and accessibility of a much smaller firm. They’ve honed their approach and their perspectives. I believe they've done a wonderful job.