ACE Insurance: Analytics critical when it comes to customer experience

A strong analytics infrastructure should ideally be the centre of an effective customer experience management strategy. However, implementing this is far from simple. Marketing interviewed Avik Sarkar, regional head of analytics, Asia Pacific at ACE Asia Pacific to find out the key challenges that the insurer faced in bringing its analytics capabilities up to scratch.Marketing: What were the biggest initial challenges when ACE began investing seriously in its analytics capabilities?Sarkar: Marketing analytics is not new to ACE - the company globally has put data at the forefront of its marketing activities. In 2010, I joined ACE Asia Pacific to lead the marketing analytics function in the region. There were two main challenges we initially faced.Firstly, our data storage and linkage capabilities required further enhancement: We had to do a lot of work to overcome the shortfalls in our infrastructure before we started on really advanced analytics work.Secondly, external stakeholders’ concerns needed to be addressed. Our insurance products are sold through our business partners such as banks, retailers and airlines, and we needed a collaborative approach with them to develop and deploy analytical solutions. Hence, it was necessary to convince our business partners about our ability, flexibility and security expertise in implementing such solutions. In particular, it was critical to demonstrate our rigour around data security before we embarked on an analytical journey since trust is of paramount importance in our business.Marketing: Would it be fair to say that analytics is key to improving customer experience?Sarkar: In my opinion, analytics is the most critical component in the whole cycle of the customer experience. Targeted campaigns based on broad segments are a thing of the past. Now, it's more about individual customer experience. It is not possible to use manual or very basic methods to mine massive data so as to provide a higher level of customer experience in the whole experiential cycle. Advanced analytics helps to further refine the ‘targeting’ for marketing campaigns, allowing the companies to enhance the promotions without additional spend.Marketing: Why do more companies not actively invest in top-notch analytics capabilities?Sarkar: It's usually due to the three major factors.1. Line of business: Analytics deployment across the organidation is essential when the business line is high volume and low return. In this kind of business line, it is now difficult to survive without analytics. However, higher return businesses can survive without analytics in the short term. Keeping in mind the shape of things to come, however, I think most companies have to invest in analytics in the next five to seven years or risk losing out to competitors.2. Upfront cost and lack of clarity on benefits: There is an upfront cost involved in setting up the whole data infrastructure and sometimes, companies are skeptical to make such an investment without clarity on the benefits. It helps if senior executives of the company have experience in witnessing benefits from analytics in their previous roles, making the process of embedding analytics in the existing processes easier.3. Skillset and competency: Analytics competency is not easy to find in certain geographies which has proven to be a bottleneck for analytics expansion, even within Asia Pacific.Marketing: Tell us about how analytics has helped ACE improve its targeting and customer service capabilities.Sarkar: We have developed and deployed a number of predictive model-based solutions in our programmes across markets within Asia Pacific, which led to significant increases (between 50 to 100% lift) in revenue for our business partners and ACE.Marketing: What are the limits of analytics in improving customer service?Sarkar: It depends on how you define ‘analytics’. In a broad sense, it can always help in improving customer service and experience. However, the caveat is, the effectiveness of a tool always lies in the hands of the user. Therefore, it is very important to design and develop the solutions keeping in mind the end-user’s level of comfort and the system environment in which he or she operates. I truly believe that if enough thought is given to implementation before designing the solution, analytics can improve almost all aspects of the customer experience.Marketing: What challenges lie ahead for the analytics function in ACE?Sarkar: We are currently in the process of implementing a cutting-edge marketing database solution in a few key countries which will integrate information across the customer life-cycle and enrich our analytics solutions. With regard to the medium to long term challenge, it will be about improving the 'recency' of the ‘input’ information in the solutions and taking it as close to real time as possible, for all the solutions.Analytics will be discussed in-depth at Marketing magazine's Analytics 2015 conference. For more information, please click here.For sponsorship information, contact Soren Beaulieu at sorenb@marketing-interactive.com or call + 65 6423 0329.For agenda and registration queries, contact Jessy Koh at jessyk@marketing-interactive.com or call +65 6423 0329.Analytics 2015 takes place on 18 June 2015 at Suntec Convention & Exhibition Centre Singapore.