Predictive analytics

The opportunity for new revenue

Proactive cross selling within an existing customer base is standard practice for many large B2C organizations. Indeed for many businesses it is their biggest source of new revenue. However for some, cross selling may be new and previously un-tapped territory. For example, an opportunity to pursue new cross selling routes has just arisen for France Telecom.

I was recently interviewed by Tom Groenfeldt of Banking Technology about an application for modeling techniques that isn’t usually front of mind: bank collections. Unfortunately, (and not entirely surprisingly) in the midst of the recent financial crisis, banks have seen an increase of late loan payments, bankruptcy, and home foreclosures. As a result, banks are paying closer attention to their customers’ borrowing and payment patterns, not only for their customers’ benefit, but also for their companies’ protection.

The past quarter has seen Portrait recognized by leading industry analysts, Forrester Research as both a ‘Leader’ and a ‘Strong Performer ‘alongside specialist niche and global enterprise vendors alike in two separate technology Waves™ ¹. We are obviously delighted with these endorsements but it is also worth exploring why we were able to achieve such notable rankings on first showings in each of these Forrester Waves™.

Last week I had the opportunity to represent Portrait Software in a Destination CRM roundtable web event titled, "Work Smarter with Customer Analytics and Business Intelligence," which featured two other software providers from the BI and call center markets. The event was educational as it combined the insights of three vendors - all of whom operate in a slightly different realm - and so have a slightly different perspective on this often-times confusing analytics space.

I recently read an interesting article in CRM Buyer called “Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences, Both Coming and Going,” in which the author makes some great points about the importance of having a complete single view of interaction with individual customers - whether that interaction is inbound or outbound. And while having a log of customer interactions is important, when approached properly, CRM systems can do so much more!