AN INTERVIEW WITH YUCHUN LEE, CEO OF UNICA CORPORATION
by Tim Staub, assistant editor

DSstar: What is the Affinium Suite?

LEE: Unica's Affinium Suite is an award-winning set of analytical CRM and marketing automation solutions that helps leading businesses implement one-toone customer interaction strategies that communicate the right message to the right person at the right time. Our software helps manage customer relationship across all channels. Affinium delivers deep functionality for data mining and predictive modeling, customer interaction and campaign management, reporting, and real-time personalization. These applications enable marketers to develop compelling, targeted offers from predictive behavior models, test and implement customer interaction strategies -- both real-time and outbound -- and then report on the business effectiveness of these strategies.

DSstar: What are the business benefits of using an analytical CRM suite?

LEE: An analytical CRM suite allows database marketers to maximize the return on their customer relationship investment by delivering relevant offers and targeted services that both meet the customers' needs and deliver greater profitability to the company. This is especially important in a soft economy. Retaining your most profitable customers and maximizing value across your customer base requires effective predictive modeling coupled with contextsensitive interaction management across channels.

Analytical CRM can increase revenue through more effective cross selling, reduce costs by eliminating wasted marketing offers, and improve customer satisfaction by personalizing communications for each customer. With the increased customer understanding and automation of a solution like ours, marketers can not only improve response rates, but also avoid sending customers offers that do not interest them.

DSstar: What business problems can an analytical CRM product help solve? Can you give a specific example?

LEE: Affinium can deliver significant business value in several ways such as increased average transaction size through effective cross selling; increased shopper-to-buyer conversion rates through personalized service and incentives; and increased customer profitability through loyalty programs that extend the duration and scope of customer relationships. An analytical CRM solution like Affinium also helps companies improve the efficacy of their marketing dollars by accurately predicting which customers are likely to be most value to a company. One of our customers who is a communications service provider has reported over $10M/month in increased revenue due to reduced customer churn. They have developed predictive churn models that accurately identify up to 60 days in advance high value subscribers who are at risk of dropping their service. The company then uses proactive treatment strategies to retain these customers.

DSstar: What kinds of business are benefiting from the Affinium Suite?

LEE: Unica's products are being used in many different industries. Some specific industries and sample customers include: Financial services companies - ABN AMRO, Scotia Bank, Nationwide Insurance, City National Bank Retail, catalog, and Internet companies - AOL-AAdvantage, Fingerhut, Lands' End Telecom - Cable and Wireless USA Hospitality - Marriott, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Pharmaceutical companies - Merck-Medco.

DSstar: Everyone talks about customer analytics and CRM. How is your product superior to others?

LEE: Many so-called analytical applications are simply historical reporting solutions based on BI or OLAP reporting against fixed data models. Historical reporting is useful to measure past business performance, but effective marketing requires predictive insights into future behaviors that are only available through data mining. Affinium's data mining solution can sift through hundreds of customer attributes to determine relevant factors for future purchases and distinguishing behavioral characteristics of your best customers. The superiority of Affinium Model was recently recognized when it was named the TDWI 2001 Pioneering Product for Customer Analytics. Affinium Model was cited for its innovation, ease of use and demonstrated ability to solve end-to-end business problems. Affinium is not only powerful, but also is easy to use and saves marketers valuable time. One of our customers, Targetbase, has credited Affinium Model with saving them up to 60% of the time it used to take to build predictive models with other solutions.

DSstar: How do you achieve these predictive insights?

LEE: Affinium Model incorporates many different analytical methods including linear and logistic regression, CHAID and CART decision trees, neural networks, K-means clustering and Naïve Bayes methods. Affinium is unique in its ability to automate the predictive modeling process including sampling, testing and validation, pre-processing, input parameter selection, algorithm selection and algorithm parameter optimization.

DSstar: How scalable is the Affinium Suite?

LEE: Our customers are some of the largest, most well known direct marketers in North America, some with databases in excess of 230 million customer and prospect records. We have over 200 customers around the world.

But scalability is more than just database size. To be truly scalable, a solution must also be sophisticated, easy to use by a wide array of people, and adaptable to future changes in processes and data infrastructure. Affinium offers all of these.

DSstar: What does it take to deploy Affinium Model in terms of time and resources?

LEE: Typically, customers are in production in less than 8 weeks. Our UDI (Universal Dynamic Interconnect) architecture allows them to work with their existing databases, including flat files, to leverage their investment. It also allows our customers to rapidly adapt to new marketing opportunities and changing IT infrastructures to achieve rapid time to business benefit and to continually evolve and improve their marketing activities.

DSstar: How can our readers learn more about the Affinium suite?

LEE: To learn more, visit our Web site - www.unicacorp.com - or call us at 781-259-5900.