i-Sight Provides Practical Tips at Customer Profitability, Loyalty and Retention Conference

Ottawa, Canada – March 30, 2009 - CEC announced today that it’s President, Ray Gerard, will be presenting at the third annual Customer Profitability, Loyalty and Retention Conference in Toronto on April 14th and 15th.

The conference will provide an opportunity for members of the customer care community to gather and exchange ideas, best practices and to learn about new products being offered to enhance customer loyalty. Ray Gerard, said “We believe in the power of customer retention to transform a business. We’ve seen our customers dramatically increase profitability by making customer concerns a priority and we’re happy to have the opportunity to share those experiences.”

CEC provides the i-Sight Customer Complaint Software, a web based application that provides flexible workflow to ensure customer complaints are handled effectively. The solution includes a world class reporting suite with dashboards and a custom report writer to ensure companies are able to learn from customer interactions.

Here are some highlights from the conference agenda:

Identify your high-profit, high value & low-risk customers
Identify customers who are close to defecting, and hear what you can do to bring them back
Learn how to measure your competitors’ customer profitability
Determine how to calculate the lifetime value of your customers
Find out how to form a bigger base of profitable clients
Leverage your customer database to target and retain profitable customers
Find out how you can use the web as a customer retention tool

GOING BEYOND THE BOTTOM LINE: ESTABLISHING A NEW PHILOSOPHY

The new customer profitability concept is more than just bottom line profit. Success is no longer being solely measured through quantity, but also quality. Establishing this new approach into a company’s mindset takes commitment, leadership and a dedicated team. In this presentation, discover how to integrate this new philosophy into the company.

Determining the math of customer profitability for CEOs
Selecting the right customers
Maintaining interest while building the customer profitability database
Developing a management model to house the new philosophy

BECOMING CUSTOMER-CENTRIC: HOW TO COLLECT CUSTOM ER INFORMATION

Capturing information about your customers is a top priority for all organizations. Understanding how to collect this information, and leverage it across all access points of your organization is fundamental to customer relationship management and maximizing customer profitability. This session will look at how to collect and use customer information to increase the strength and value of your customer relationships.

Getting the right information from your customers to provide better customer service
Optimizing customer interfaces among human, system and environment touch-points
Impact on channel management and customer interaction
Integrating the customer experience across alternative interfaces
Using technology to capture the voice of customer
How to measure customer satisfaction: a reference model
Complaint management as a chance to obtain valuable information

IDENTIFYING PROFITABLE CUSTOMERS THROUGH ADVANCED RESEARCH TOOLS

Identifying, attracting and retaining your most profitable customers are keys to success in business, as it is often the case that most profits are generated by a fraction of a business’ customers. Advances in research techniques and database mining now help in the identification of the most profitable customers as well as those with the highest lifetime value. This session will look at best practices to easily and accurately identify and cultivate the most profitable relationships.

How all customers are not created equal and how to identify those who are substantially more profitable than others
How to deviate from traditional customer satisfaction programs
How to prepare customized programs and communications for high-value customers
How to forecast your customers’ future behavior and profitability

RECLAIMING CUSTOMERS THROUGH THE INTERNET

Since the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, businesses have been actively employing strategies for effectively using the internet to serve their customers. Using innovative online strategies can be key to improved customer retention, as it can aid in the building of "one-to-one" relationships with your clients through individualized service as well as provide valuable information about your customers. This session will take a look at practices for using your online presence to enhance customer profitability.

Best practices for offering personalized service on your web site
Online customer retention strategies
Building personalized web pages for your customers
Technologies and tools available to personalize the customer relationship
E-services and e-intelligence: their role in measuring and maximizing customer profitability
Interfacing with customers
Effectively using information technology to farm for prospective customers

CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY AND PRODUCT DIVERSIFICATION

Instead of spending large budgets on expanding your customer base, a company can increase its ROI and improve its bottom line through redirecting funds to lengthening its list of products and options available to existing profitable clients. This session will look at making the most of your branding and utilizing the concept of cross selling to maximize the lifetime value of existing profitable customers.

Diversification of product and portfolio offerings to excite and retain profitable customers
Profit maximization through product portfolio management
Avoiding cannibalization
Product diversification as the key to customer advantage over competitor advantage
Focus on life time value of customers

GAUGING CUSTOMERS’ OVERALL LIFETIME VALUE: CUSTOMER RETENTION AND LOYALTY PROGRAMS

Understanding lifetime value requires an analysis of the value generated by the current and potential customer base across the full cycle from acquisition through exit, across all products. The value can be maximized by building a dynamic customer-centric organization that is focused on selling customized, interactive information enriched solutions. This session will take a look calculating customer life time value and developing and implementing targeted loyalty and retention campaigns through the use of customer lifetime value analysis.

The linkage between customer loyalty, retention and customer life time value-profitability
How to define the value of a customer: methods for calculating customer life time value
Strategies to focus on the right customers for highest profits
Calculating the cumulative revenues, costs and profits of your customer segments
How value can be maximized on a long-term basis through products, customers, usage, pricing, acquisition and cost to serve

THE INFORMATION EXPLOSION: INTERPRETING YOUR DATA

Successful customer profitability strategies combine data at the customer level into strategic customer intelligence systems used to guide performance improvement. Transforming customer information into superior intelligence enables you to develop effective strategies to grow your business. This session will look at strategic use of customer profit-ability information and how to identify and measure profitable customers through the analysis of very large transaction volumes using data warehousing tools and techniques.

Using of customer profitability information to ensure that the customer is given prominence in business decision making
Designing a customer intelligence framework
Key data: customer attitudes and behaviours, transactional and cash flow data, key indicators on industry and competitive dynamics, and internal customer service process metrics
Differentiating between new customers, retained customers and defectors
Measuring customer profitability: determining the right depth of analysis
Importance of analysis across time: elimination of anomalous events
Software and tools: promise and reality

SEGMENTATION AND CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY

Optimization of your marketing dollar can be achieved through effective segmentation. Focusing on customer segmentation allows businesses to differentiate themselves by offering unique services and support to their most valuable customers, without compromising service standards for other customer tiers. Companies can drive profits and reduce customer churn through focused strategies by providing the appropriate service for each profitable customer segment. This session will show how to personalize the relationship between your company and its most profitable customers through segmentation.

Identifying the most effective criteria for segmenting the customer base
Translating customer segmentation into targeting and messaging to the most profitable customers
Designing relationship programs to meet target segment needs
Measuring the performance of your segmentation to drive your relationship management programs

CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY AND ROI

The traditional business model was centered around products with marketers focused on attracting customers to their products with market share acquisition driving growth. More recently, the customer-centric model has marketers matching product to customer preference driven by share of customer and retention. The impetus of this shift is return on investment - marketing the right mix of product, margin and channel to customers that results in loyal and profitable customers.

Considerations when building customer profitability and ROI models
Customer loyalty vs. share of customer and the impact on customer strategy
Case studies demonstrating the power of ROI analysis
Lifetime value, marketing opportunity matrix and other tools

COMPREHENSIVE CUSTOMER ANALYSIS TO IMPROVE PROFITABILITY

In today’s business market, new and aggressive competitors are continuously wooing your customers away. Advertising costs are soaring through the roof and there are mountains of information to sift through. The only way to stay on top is by knowing your customers, by recognizing which clients are bringing you the profits and understanding their expectations. Measuring the critical steps in building customer relation-ships and performing comprehensive customer analysis are key to addressing areas for process improvement that drive revenue growth and customer profitability. This session will help you develop a customized plan to understand your customer and their expectations for current and future performance in order to drive profitability.

What is, and will be, the role of analytics in creating a successful business intelligence strategy and improving customer profitability
Choosing appropriate metrics to facilitate execution of their business intelligence strategy
Assessing methods of capturing the voice of the customer
VOC methodologies: customer advisory boards, user groups, blogs, surveys, complaints, call centers, transaction pulses, executive listening sessions, sales and service call reports
Understanding the forces on your customers’ business, market trends, customer segmentation and customer experience
Patterns to proactively manage your customer relationships

About CEC

Based in Ottawa, Canada, CEC (www.customerexpressions.com) is a leading provider of web-based insurance customer service and complaint handling solutions. Customer Expressions has gained an international reputation for best-in-class software to optimize the management of various business processes. The privately held firm provides i-Sight, integrated case management software for investigations, call tracking, customer service, complaint handling, corrective and preventive action management (CAPA Management), and other business processes that require case management.

For further information, please contact:
Joe Gerard, Vice-President, Sales & Marketing
800-465-6089 or media@customerexpressions.com