The retention of customers is important to all firms, but is especially important for Mobile operators where competition is fierce and consumers can quickly and easily move from one network to another, often with a better device and a cheaper calling plan. Initiatives like T-Mobile linking contracts with discounted T-Mobile hotspot access can create a degree of lock in for some customer segments. SBS have been active with mobile operators for over six years and have designed many customer engagement solutions, including a revamped Welcome Call for Vodafone.

For retailers, managing customers can be very tricky if customer contact information does not usually form part of the product purchase, say, purchasing a morning coffee and a newspaper. Many retailers have evolved mechanisms to get to know their customers, for example, the Starbucks card that tracks individual customer spend across their range and across outlets. SBS have helped many retailers to improve the quality of customer data available to them and to leverage the value in this information through targeted campaigns or through improved media purchases. SBS Direct also build predictive models, tracking recency, frequency and value of spend and up-weighting advertising spend in the direction of the most valuable customers.

Financial services is a sector rich in customer data, but also heavy in compliance and regulation which can make it difficult to articulate strong sales messages. A particular driver of success in Financial Services is cross-selling, using an established relationship with a customer to promote additional products or services that might be of interest. One of the difficulties is generating genuine diversity for a proposition and a unique voice for the brand - sometimes hard to do when yours is one of 27 low rate credit cards with a six month 0% balance transfer offer. Some organisations such as Direct Line are good at creating an identity and a range of propositions that can be easily cross sold. SBS Direct have worked with Abbey and Citibank amongst others, to develop cross-sell offers working with partners such as RAC, to build multi-channel programmes that deliver new sales but also create a degree of lock-in for the finance brand.

Few things in life are more important than education and providers take this responsibility seriously. Having worked with Edinburgh's Napier University to smooth enquiry processes and integrate different channels, SBS Direct understand the diversity of student requests and needs. Our work for LearnDirect delivered quality assurance metrics for training providers across Scotlan. Having won awards for work in this field, both for tertiary education activity and continuing professional development activity, SBS is well suited to help organisations to make best use of customer data, to provide a superior service and focus time and resources on the areas of greatest need and opportunity.

For many leisure businesses, for example, Hotels, information capture is not a primary objective of customer facing staff. Providing a good experience is usually top of the list, with information capture following some considerable way back. Organisations such as Westin, have however managed to combine service excellence with information excellence. Our work with Westin in UK and Ireland has demonstrated that using customer data in a personalised manner can create very compelling communications. Email activity is easy to facilite to masses of customers, but our approach that worked for Westin centered around the "less is more" principle - improving the quality of personalisation and decreasing volumes actually lifted conversions and lowered opt-outs. By proving that we can make the brand more relevant to its target customers, SBS Direct gained more communications activity and delivered more value by providing tighter integration between customer marketing channels.

When Ford did a mystery shopping exercise across its 50 largest global customer communication centres, SBS Direct ranked #1 out of 50. This was achieved through our efforts to personalise the customer experience and create more opportunities for dealer staff to talk with relevance to customers. This service excellence resulted in greatly increased customer engagement which led directly to improved outcomes, including substantially increase retention rates. It also let to higher average spend levels for servicing packages. All of this was done whilst simplifying and streamlining customer facing processes, making life easier for both staff and customers. We can build advanced customer profile models to fit individual packages to customers and create communications that are relevant and tailored, greatly increasing engagement and life value.

For an industry which saw little or no competition for many years, the Utilities industry is now a very competitive market with large incumbents now facing competition from new starts and well funded competitors from other territories. For these companies that all sell exactly the same product, the opportunties to separate themselves from competitors are limited. Differentiation based on service and added value packages are the way to go. For SBS Direct this is an ideal marketplace to build segmentation models and from these models to develop campaigns matching service packages to different consumer segments. With British Gas we designed and implemented a targeted win back programme to cost-effectively add new customers and create service propositions to retain them for the long term.

In online, broadcast and print media, SBS Direct have extensive experience of driving content and customisation to maximise the value of customer relationships. We have designed and managed subscription services, customer research, compititions and customer loyalty schemes to increase revenue per customer and reduce the cost of customer management. Traditional broadcasters with an online model, such as BBC have a fantastic heritage that can be clearly marketed through new channels and onto new devices, carrying over brand strengh and trust to newer media options. BBC through its Innovation arm are very active in Web 2.0 applications, looking at advanced technologies such as geographic locations and third party mapping products to link into BBC editorial content and also, and more importantly, user generated content. SBS Direct understands that whilst some new entrants can make a big splash very quickly, e.g. YouTube, traditional media owners may struggle but are finding keen interest from local communities in UGC. SBS Direct have experience of UGC management, content management and content repurposing for new channels and devices. This gives the biggest return on investment and creates compelling experiences for new and traditional viewers / consumers.

For many basic products, e.g. Bread, Milk, etc, there is little value in building a database and trying to incentivise purchase. However, this is not to say that FMCG is not an area for new technologies and new approches, quite the reverse. Some supermarkets are making heavy use of DM techniques to analyse customers and baskets by linking loyalty scheme data and till data to form a picture of customer activity. Tesco are famous for their database acivities and even part own the agency that manages their CRM activity. Some producers also are finding DM techniques have a place in FMCG. For example, SBS work for KP foods backing up independent retailer promotions, to gain improved uptake of promotions and gain better store positions. DM also worked for Kraft Foods, in the B2B market to help place more hot drinks facilities in business / public serve areas and create pull for Kenco coffee brand. Our work created an integrated database where previously there had been disconnected lists and out of data, inconsistent data.