Tag Archives: BI

Omni-Channel Cost Shifting

One of the great benefits customer lifecycle programs bring to the party is unearthing cross-divisional or functional profitability opportunities that otherwise would fall into the cracks between units and not be addressed.  What I think most managers in the omni-channel space may not realize (yet) is how significant many of these issues can be.

To provide some context for those purely interested in the marketing side, this idea joins quite closely to the optimizing for worst customers and sales cannibalization discussions, but is more concerned with downstream operational issues and finance.  Cost shifting scenarios will become a lot more common as omnichannel concepts pick up speed.

Shifty Sales OK, Costs Not?

Why is cost shifting important to understand?  Many corporate cultures can easily tolerate sales shifting between channels because of the view that “any sale is good”.  On the ground, this means sourcing sales accurately in an omni-channel environment requires too much effort relative to the perceived benefits to be gained.  Fair enough; some corporate cultures simply believe any sale is a good sale even if they lose money on it!

Cost shifting  tends to be a different story though, because the outcomes show up as budget variances and have to be explained.  In many ways, cost shifting is also easier to measure, because the source is typically simple to capture once the issue surfaces.  And as a cultural issue, people are used to the concept of dealing with budget variances.

Here’s a common case:

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Choosing the Size of Control Groups

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)


Q: I am a big fan of your web site and read your Drilling Down book. Great work!

A: Thanks for the kind words!

Q: I was wondering if you could help me picking the right control group size for a project of ours? The population is 25 million telco customers that for which we want to do a long term impact analysis (month by month) in regards to revenue increase versus control group. The marketing initiatives are mix of retention, lifecycle and tactical/seasonal activities. We want to measure revenue increase through any of the marketing activities compared to control group.

A: Great project, this is the kind of idea that can really improve margins if you can find out which specific tactics drop the most profit to the bottom line.

Q:I have searched the web for some help and found calculators that say: On 25 million and smallest expected uplift of 0.1% and highest likely rate of > 5% the calculator gives 250k (1%).  Is that sufficient to calculate the net impact on the remaining base?  Would be very grateful if you could give me your thoughts.

A  Well, it could be and might not be…

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Hacking the RFM Model

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)


Q: First of all thank you for your help.  I have some questions I would be pleased if you answer them for me.

A: No problem!

Q: 1. RFM analysis – is it possible to use some other ranking technique rather than quintiles Using quintiles for bigger databases will cause many tied values, isn’t it a problem?

A: Sure, you can use it any way it works best for you. There is no “magic” behind quintiles, you can use deciles or whatever works best. It’s the idea of ranking by Recency, Frequency, and Value that is the key concept in the model.

I’ve seen dozens and perhaps hundreds of variations on the core RFM model, depending on how you classify a “variation”. One change that’s common is changing the scaling, as you mention above, to accommodate the size of the database. Smaller databases use quartiles or even tertiles. Larger databases, choose the ordered distribution that meets the need.

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