Gartner has a case study up on how AXA Financial one of the largest U.S. financial services providers (FSPs) used Business Intelligence technologies to help focus its sales force, it basically involved putting low-tech booklets with information specifically tailored to individual needs into the hands of its financial advisors. The data collected enabled AXA to dramatically increase its business with established customers, which convinced AXA's executive team and most of its employees of BI's value.

Excerpts from the article:

Before AXA could achieve its marketing objectives for its wide range of products, it had to address several issues:

• Because of the number of its legacy systems, the company was unable to create consolidated views of customers' data to share across the organization. AXA had managed to collect a great deal of information on its customers, but was unable to analyze it.
• AXA's understanding of customers' preferences was limited, because it operated under a decentralized business model: Its customer relationships were managed by a large, widely dispersed team of financial advisors.
• AXA also had to gain a better understanding of what its financial professionals needed to achieve their sales goals.

Objective

AXA sought to maintain its focus on customers, while expanding product offerings, enhancing services and cross-selling them. It also wanted to implement a process that would more-efficiently reconnect unassigned policyholders with active associates and improve customer satisfaction index scores at each of its branches. To accomplish this, AXA needed to:

• Refine the understanding of the role of its financial professionals and determine what information they would find useful to assist in the development of their practice and client management functions.
• Determine the most-effective and efficient means of delivering that information to the financial professionals.

AXA wanted to develop a BI infrastructure that would support these objectives. Specifically, it needed analytical capabilities and the ability to consolidate the data into a single view that would give key managers at all levels appropriate access to relevant, accurate, consistent and timely data, and analysis of risk factors relevant to increasing the sales force's effectiveness.

Approach

The BI initiative started with a clear set of business objectives and technical requirements. From the start, it was designed to take advantage of "low-hanging fruit" - that is, opportunities that could provide a rapid return on investment (ROI). Early in the project, AXA determined key performance metrics that would guide the project and enable it to assess results:

• Improve customer and product profitability
• Reconnect unassigned policyholders with active associates
• Reinforce and grow established relationships with customers
• Improve customer satisfaction index scores at each branch

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai