Financial goals are best reached with long-term planning - be it savings plans, carefully arranged financing, or any and all forms of insurance coverage.  When it's part of a plan and all goes well, the results intended are the ones achieved. All very good, right?

But even the best laid plans at some point go awry. Or things simply happen ("it happens') - it's a part of life.

Those can be known as "crunch times," especially when the solution is a financially-driven one that calls for getting a short-term loan. That crunch time can be caused by an accident, a natural disaster, or even a great opportunity that can't be passed up, and in that moment the last thing the customer wants to hear is that you can't help them.

That's the scenario that plays out for most customers of oneleading provider of short-term loans for people in situations not normally served by banks or other traditional lenders. They can be payday loans, online loans, installment loans, title loans and more. The one critical common denominator to all those scenarios is that they call for real-time responses. So in order to keep their business viable, this lender needed to find a way to respond effectively in real-time to their customers' crunch times.

In order to do that, the lender uses analytically-driven real-time decisioning with the goal of being consistently fair, thorough, and most of all, fast. On any given day, they process approximately 20,000 decisions and average about 15-20 milliseconds per decision. They also process about 1,300 new customers each day, averaging about 3 seconds per decision in those cases.

They pair that real-time responsiveness with a sensitivity to the needs of the customer through a stair-stepped process by which they try to ramp-up benefits for the best customer experience each time. The company knows that "no" is not a good answer to a request for a short-term loan, so the customer may be offered a smaller amount than originally requested in those cases where they might otherwise be turned down.

That approach fosters trust in ways that builds a long-term relationship because over time and through a good repayment history, the customer reduces his or her risk profile.

Through this approach, 97% of the lender's customers rate their overall experience with the company as good to excellent. Does that increase the chances that they'll reach out to the lender again next time they're in a crunch? I think we can be certain they will.

You can also hear details in real-time at The DMA's Marketing Analytics Conference in Chicago, March 9-11, 2015. John Lodmell, VP of Credit and Data will present the story of real-time decisioning and how it drives customer experiences that build long-term loyalty.