O&M Transformed its Office to a BI Hub for International Clients
A case study on Business Service Management inReader ROI
Executive Summary
When one of the world's most-coveted ad agencies, Ogilvy and Mather, wanted to take customer satisfaction to a new level, it turned to BI.
The Organization: For over 60 years, Ogilvy and Mather has been in the business of building brands. The advertising agency has turned brands like American Express, Ford, Shell, Pond's, Cadbury, and Vodafone into household names, cementing relationships between its clients and their consumers. Today, thanks to those strong bonds, O&M, as it is popularly known, is one of the eight largest ad agencies in the world.
Case Study Highlights
The Business Case: But O&M wasn’t going to rest on its laurels. It wanted to take its business to a new level by leveraging its strength: Understanding consumer trends (like buying patterns) and combining that with a client’s data (like age, gender and other demographics). This way O&M could help its clients position their products to the right people. For example, if a candy manufacturer wanted to know where its products weren’t doing well, it could create targeted marketing campaigns for that location.
And to deliver that intelligence, the company turned to Rohan Deshpande, CTO, O&M Worldwide. Deshpande was tasked to develop a BI tool that could extract value from hordes of unstructured data (collected from surveys and market research) produced by O&M’s clients.
And just like that his plush office in northern Mumbai was going to transform into an intelligence hub for O&M’s clients world over.
The First Steps: Deshpande decided to dive into the deepest point of the company’s client base: North America and Europe. These clients stream in data that they wanted O&M’s consultants to analyze.
“One of the most important aspects of analytics is building a skillset with an in-depth understanding of numbers and the hidden business value behind them,” he says.
Deshpande built a team of about 15 people including database engineers, business consultants, and statisticians for number crunching.
The desired format in which clients have to send data is pre-determined. Once data is received, statisticians and consultants work on it to come up with insights.
The Challenges: But to accommodate that sort of number crunching, Deshpande would need servers. And ss chunks of data moved from North America to India, it was obvious that O&M’s bandwidth requirements were going to shoot up. “Our bandwidth requirement increased from 25 mbps to about 75 mbps,” says Deshpande.
Scaling up both in terms of hardware and storage meant preparing systems for unknown needs. So, Deshpande turned to server virtualization which provided the much needed flexibility.
The Benefits: Today, BI project has helped the company's clients develop better strategies for profiling customer segments, gain better insights and track a campaign’s effectiveness. For example, Deshpande says, a North American retail chain got insights into what segment of customers tend to spend on what commodities the most, and how they can improve the marketing on commodities that weren't doing well.
"BI has helped our clients make the most of existing sales patterns and enhance the potential of other brands by better product positioning, and opening more channels of communication."
The Person Behind It
One of the most important aspects of analytics is building a skillset with an in-depth understanding of numbers and the hidden business value behind them.
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