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 Overview Success Stories
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CIBC Card Products Chooses Chordiant Marketing Director™ to Reduce Costs and Increase Efficiencies 
CIBC is a leading North American financial institution comprising five strategic business units: Retail Products, Retail Markets, Wealth Management, CIBC World Markets, and Amicus. CIBC has more than eight million retail banking customers and approximately 8,000 corporate and investment banking customers. At the end of fiscal 2001, total assets were $287.5 billion and market capitalization was $17.7 billion.
BackgroundBefore implementing Chordiant's Marketing Director™, CIBC's marketing department depended heavily on agencies and outsourced letter shops, which provided the firm with data processing and management. A major drawback to this arrangement was the long period that existed between when the firm actually extrapolated its data from its own internal prospects lists to pass on to the agencies and the time the company was able to deploy strategies based on the data. Due to both this time lag and the short utility period of the data, the entire process proved to be ineffective, resulting in lower response rates. In addition to the time lag issue, CIBC had difficulty manually coordinating marketing efforts across its products portfolio. For example, for CIBC's 10 VISA products, common marketing functions, such as determining the order of product launches and prioritizing target lists, proved to be time consuming and inefficient. The company decided to re-engineer its entire marketing process. The first order of business was to implement some type of automation capability in order to bring much of the outsourced marketing activity in-house. The key activities the company wanted to automate were list management, which included how the company merged, cleansed, and prepared its lists for mailing, and data sharing amongst various groups across the company. Through the orchestration of its marketing processes and investment in marketing automation technology, CIBC was able to eliminate its dependence on marketing agencies by applying marketing rules and performing data manipulation to its lists upfront. This strategy saved CIBC money, shortened its time lines, and reduced the number of resources required. Selecting Chordiant Marketing Director For CIBC, utilizing scattershot, mass marketing across all of its product categories at the same time was not an option. The company determined that the best marketing strategy would be to focus on optimizing its ability to present the right offer to the right customer - both for retention and acquisition purposes. After reviewing several marketing automation vendors, CIBC concluded that Chordiant Marketing Director would best enable them to pursue this strategy. The primary reason for the selection was that Marketing Director allowed CIBC to incorporate the modeling necessary to build market segments and to allocate which segments got which products without the entire process becoming too labor-intensive. The product also allowed CIBC to integrate all its products to create a single message. While the company stresses the importance of having a sound business process in place before implementing a marketing automation technology, CIBC did have to adapt its business processes somewhat to best utilize the Chordiant solution. For example, the company had to modify the way it organized its campaigns. Because Marketing Director utilizes a hierarchical structure that dictates how programs are planned, when setting up a marketing program, a company has to make decisions upfront (such as if campaigns will be planned by product or customer lifecycles). CIBC found this aspect of the product to be beneficial because it forced marketing programs to be planned in the same way. Everyone involved in the marketing process had to agree on a standard on which they were going to structure their programs and enter information in their databases. CIBC also chose Chordiant because it wanted to expand its marketing efforts into new channels and, according to CIBC, Chordiant offered the best multi-channel solution on the market. The company found that when compared to other solutions, Marketing Director offered simple access to data. Other applications made data access difficult - "like a black box" of data. Moreover, the company's engineers examined the code behind Marketing Director and concluded that the sequel by Chordiant was more suited to their needs than other software vendors. The company also looked at how Marketing Director could integrate with other software - such as software aligned with customer interactions across the enterprise - not just with campaign management. CIBC saw that Chordiant's solution had aligned its technologies with the interaction side rather than data mining side, thus enhancing the integration of marketing functionality with call center and other Chordiant technologies. This fit well with CIBC's belief that good marketing strategy is not about data mining or reporting, but about interacting with the customer. Return on Investment CIBC built its business case for implementing a marketing automation solution on cost reduction and so far the company considers the choice to be a good one. Once CIBC was live with Marketing Director (the first implementation cycle took four months), CIBC was able to do list selection upfront and eliminate the costs associated with outsourcing data processing, list management, and database management, providing considerable cost savings. In addition, the company no longer needs a database manager, a savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But according to CIBC, the biggest savings came as a result of the more efficient, re-engineered business process. CIBC estimates that it was able to save several million dollars through the newly orchestrated operational business processes. In addition, CIBC expects an ROI on a campaign-by-campaign basis of 10-15% due to their re-engineering effort and the Chordiant solution. Lessons Learned CIBC believes that before a company considers investing in marketing automation it must first take a hard look at how it manages customer interactions across the enterprise. CIBC advises that to see real value from technology, companies must be able to modify their business processes to obtain the optimal benefit of the technology. In regards to the Chordiant solution, CIBC states that the solution is not a difficult one, but neither is it a simple one to use. It requires the skill of more than just generic marketers. CIBC states that companies implementing Marketing Director would need marketing analysts that are competent in both marketing processes and data management to manage the product. Going Forward CIBC's likely next step is to implement marketing optimization functionality. Currently, CIBC optimizes campaigns on a manual basis. An example would be the optimization of sequences, i.e., how many times the company targets an individual and the selection, frequency and order of offers. The company has found this process to be very data and process intensive. In addition, a myriad of elements also make the process difficult, including model scores, profitability predictions, and costs. By leveraging partnerships that Chordiant has with marketing optimization technologies, CIBC will be able to match market segments and individual accounts to marketing strategies up front, without manual work, thus cutting costs. |  | |
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