SAS’ Brent Lever has been having a great back-and-forth with Paul Sweeney, Director of Innovation at VoiceSage and blogger at You’ve Been Noticed, about the idea (and importance!) of planning communications to your customers and integrating those communications into an overall strategy.

The timing for this could hardly be better, as Brent just finished his most recent white paper titled Adaptive Contact Planning, Building customer trust and value through improved contact policy management.

I’m including the Table of Contents and the introduction for Brent’s paper below. If you’d like, you can download the full PDF.

Adaptive Contact Planning, Building customer trust and value through improved contact policy management

Table of Contents

• Campaign Planning... 2
• The Adaptive Contact Planning Process... 3
• The Importance of Contact Policy... 4
• An Example... 4
• Dynamic Testing... 5
• Advanced Adaptive Contact Planning... 6
• Summary... 7

Planning marketing campaigns is a challenge, and it isn’t getting any easier. There are new types of communications, new channels, fickle and saturated customers, and fierce competition. On top of that, there are limiting factors such as budget caps, campaign volumes and channel capacities that affect how communications are planned and deployed. Knowing what to offer and how often to communicate with your customers is very important. If your customers opt out, you’ll lose the ability to communicate with them on a regular basis – a very serious problem. However, communications often can’t be anticipated until a trigger-based or real-time interaction uncovers a need and the opportunity for an additional communication. Nevertheless, it’s important to manage and account for all of your communications, including those that take place from triggers or in real time. The good news is that a solution to this problem is emerging.

This paper is not about how to implement more effective campaign strategies. It is about a way to plan campaigns in a smarter way. As always in marketing, it can never be perfect, and it has to be understandable. Any successful process should utilize the latest analytical techniques and consider your company’s corporate objectives and business rules. The process discussed in this paper is called adaptive contact planning.

First, there are three the types of communications that need to be considered within the adaptive contact planning process:

• Planned campaigns: These are large-batch campaigns that are designed to promote a particular product or service of the company, for example, a mortgage campaign for a bank or a bundle of products for a telecommunications company.
• Trigger-based campaigns: These are highly relevant campaigns that occur directly as a result of some action on the part of the customer. For example, a change of address or a large deposit in the bank may create an opportunity to interact with the customer in a more direct manner.
• Real-time campaigns: These are campaigns that are made directly during a customer interaction. This could be an offer that is made to the customer as a result of relevant real time information that is being collected.Download the full PDF to continue reading.