Plus Comm Uses Quadstone For Knowledge-Based Mktng
Quadstone, Inc. has announced that fast-growing marketing services powerhouse, Plus Communications International (PCI), is utilizing their Decisionhouse software to change the way customer care campaigns are conducted and billed. PCI is using Decisionhouse to offer their clients a "pay-per-success" program that bills clients based on actual sales resulting from the campaign, rather than the number of hours spent on the campaign.
PCI is able to offer this progressive, competitive approach with confidence because they are basing their calls on an accurate prediction of the targeted customers' propensity to buy. Their unique "In-Campaign Modeling" process, utilizing Quadstone's software, accurately and quickly targets the customers who are most likely to produce positive sales results based on the behavior patterns demonstrated during the campaign. The speed of Decisionhouse enables PCI to do analysis that refines and redirects resources within a campaign, rather than waiting for results from one campaign to improve the next.
The speed of the Decisionhouse-driven modeling process also gives Plus Communications the ability to deliver project results to their clients in a fraction of the time needed by their competitors. In one example of work done for a destination resort customer looking for improved targeted marketing, PCI was able to deliver all results in just a few days, rather than the four to six weeks quoted by their competition. "The ease with which Decisionhouse interfaces with data sources and then delivers analytical results is the key to our success with our clients," said Richard Selmeier, VP/GM of PCI's Decision Support division. Matthew Wyatt, director of Decision Support Technology, maintains that because Decisionhouse goes through the iterative nature of the decision process more quickly, "building a customer profile takes 25% of the time formerly required."
"Our analytic processes would be four to five times as long without Decisionhouse," said Jeffrey McDermott, president and CEO at PCI. "The faster we can react to the data coming in, the faster we can fine-tune our results. Decisionhouse makes it incredibly easy for our analysts to build a robust and accurate model, so we can adjust quicker than anyone else can. It also allows us to get a determination of our target price as early as possible. Because we can do that, we can maximize our sales rate and therefore offer pay-per-performance to our clients. This is the key differentiator for PCI. The speed of Decisionhouse embraces our philosophy to achieve maximum profitability and speed to market for our clients."
According to PCI management, Decisionhouse has enabled the company to maximize both the effectiveness and the efficiency of its current personnel at producing quality results. Without Decisionhouse, it would have taken an additional 4-6 staff members to meet the demands of their increasing workload.
With Quadstone's customer behavior modeling technology, PCI can determine the point of maximum profit on the whole campaign and know when to discontinue a campaign which would no longer yield profitable sales. This also results in fewer annoyed customers, as only those who would be interested in the product or service are targeted.
PCI has used this behavior-based marketing technique to augment results of a caller ID campaign for one of its large telecommunications customers. By using in-campaign modeling, PCI achieved positive results and improved relevant business measures of success. Wyatt explained that "Decisionhouse saves money and makes money." In another campaign for a telecommunications company, Selmeier reported an "increased response rate from 0.8 to almost 4.0%."
"PCI's work is an example of behavior-based marketing at its very best," says Mark Smith, senior vice president at Quadstone. "Analyzing basic demographics doesn't provide enough information to stay competitive. Determining the truly profitable customers requires an understanding of customer behavior. Once marketing and business analysts have this valuable information, they can determine the customers who can be influenced most by a marketing action. This is a very important difference, especially for a company such as PCI who is willing to share in their clients' risk by basing their entire fee structure on consumers' response to a campaign."
PCI is a knowledge-based marketing services company providing multi-mode customer contact including inbound and outbound, fax, IVR, and internet response services, that provides a customer centric focus through the aggregation of customer behaviors across all channels. The aggregated data is used to develop powerful customer models with services provided on a pay-for-performance basis. Applications include sales, service, retention and collection campaigns that develop models for product targeting, churn analysis, and profitability analysis.
Quadstone Inc. is a leading developer of customer behavior modeling software for business analysts in the banking, insurance, retail, and telecommunications industries. Quadstone's Decisionhouse and Transactionhouse high-speed analysis tools swiftly create visual, graphical models of customer behavior, such as purchasing patterns and consumer profiles, enabling organizations to devise more effective marketing campaigns according to the needs of each of their millions of customers.
Founded in November 1994, Quadstone began operations in March 1995. The company employs around 100 staff and is and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, with US headquarters located in Boston, MA and a European operations office in London, England. Quadstone was recently selected as Best Start-Up Business by the British Venture Capital Association and The Financial Times. In addition, both the company and its products have won numerous other recent awards. For more information, please call 617-753-7393 or visit http://www.quadstone.com.