Process management

Creating a perfect rapport is not simply a case of communicating with your customers, it comes from communicating with each customer individually, on their level. Whether that means offering a single customer a competition-beating deal or tailoring your message beyond a simple mail merge, a solution like Experian’s Marketswitch Optimisation can help. It enables you to develop personalised communications that match your goals and customers’ priorities.

Outbound leads are powerful, but they’re also expensive. Building quality data into your pipeline and maximising the quality of your customer records with tools such as Experian’s Marketswitch Optimisation and Aperture Data Studio helps to simplify the time-consuming aspects of your communications strategy – meaning your staff can do more with less.

There’s no business crystal ball, so you’ll need to make your own predictions. A tool like Marketswitch Optimisation enables you to consider multiple potential scenarios and strategies before putting them into action. Once you’ve used its insights to balance the potential benefits with the inevitable trade-offs, you’ll be able to offer your customers the best possible interactions.

Risk is present throughout the customer lifecycle. Analysing your own metrics against those of the market at large gives you the ability to safely meet the expectations of your customers and stakeholders without overstretching or overloading on delinquent accounts. Solutions like Marketswitch Optimisation or Ascend Analytics are ideal for this.

Keeping abreast of the status of your own customer accounts is valuable but looking at the credit industry as a whole can be a priceless indicator of current and upcoming trends. Experian’s Ascend Analytics on Demand is one way to analyse everything together, with tools that blend your local data with anonymised third-party data sets.

Trends help ready your business for future challenges, and the more data you can add to your predictions, the more accurate their forecasts will be. With a tool like Experian’s Ascend, you can create models that are shaped by machine-learning techniques and incorporate large-scale future-focused data to spot opportunities that humans might miss.

Collecting data together is one thing but acting on it is quite another. Using the benchmarking, customer management analysis and scorecard tools of a product like Experian Ascend, you’ll be able to analyse that data in real-time – and output your findings in easy-to-understand formats that sell themselves over the conference table.

With an advanced analysis model constructed with a tool like Experian Ascend, you’re able to do more than gain a full view of the direction your business should be taking and the things you could be doing better. You can feed your model further into an automatic decision-making package like Experian’s PowerCurve Customer Acquisition, using it to directly lead customer and credit decisions and ensure that planned future becomes a reality.

Knowing your customer is vital, so products like Experian’s eConsumerView give you access to every important data point required to make an accurate personal lending decision based on your internal policies and risk appetite. This includes real-time credit information, which helps ensure that your underwriting processes are responsible and fast. When lending to businesses, a tool like Experian’s Business Express can help with instant appraisals.

Verifying identity and ownership is crucial when securing finance against property. You can improve your decision-making process by employing a platform like Experian eConsumerView. This enables you to view up-to-date Land Registry and Homeowner Verification data can make saying yes far less of a worry. Tools like ProveID and International Identity Verification can also help you ensure they are who they say they are.

Some customers might pass your usual tests and come backed by a strong credit score but knowing just how much debt they are already carrying can offer a clearer picture of their true financial health. Tapping into the Consumer Indebtedness Index (CII) through a platform like eConsumerView allows you to use current borrowing and credit card behaviour to identify individuals who may be financially sound now but who might become a problem later.

Fostering strong relationships means knowing your customers well. Running a platform such as PowerCurve Customer Management or PowerCurve Collections not only speeds up and strengthens your decision-making processes around risky buyers, but its rich customer data also helps to locate high-value individuals and customise your communications to match.

Consolidating customer data helps you detangle and harmonise what can be an overwhelming volume of information. It also helps quickly clarify ways in which your sales and marketing processes can be improved on a customer-by-customer basis. Building a Single Customer View with a company like Experian can transform your ability to highlight cross-selling options – or avoid those customers for whom cross-selling may pose a risk.

Business development does not need to be based on guesswork or limited research. With insights provided by tools like Experian’s MarketIQ and BusinessView, you’ll be able to inspect the current state of the market, look at competitors’ strengths, and spot new opportunities to offer your customers more.

If your business is willing to contribute details on your customer records, others are too. A service like Experian’s Credit Account Information Sharing (CAIS) program allows lenders, banks and more to share credit performance and account behaviour data under the Principles of Reciprocity, a regulated agreement that ensures compliant data and fair sharing.

Raising your data access level with a facility like CAIS sharpens your decision-making process. It offers you the chance to validate new customers against six years’ worth of data that includes over 490 million credit accounts a month. The data covers the vast majority of the UK lending market, including credit and store card data, which can act as indicators of financial stress.

By looking at your company’s historical data next to the collected records of a database such as CAIS, you can analyse retrospective trends and behaviours across the entire credit landscape. An eye on the past can make you aware of potential tweaks to your credit policy in the future. 

A shared database is not only a way to cover private customers – it can help you make decisions about commercial lending, too. Experian’s Commercial Credit Account Information Sharing includes a database containing the credit history of 13.3 million commercial credit accounts and is supported by all major lenders and creditors.