Experian Marketing Services

Experian expands revenue opportunities by developing global market insight tools.

Alteryx develops a business solution for conducting advanced worldwide customer research from a single platform

Experian is a global leader in providing analytic and information services to organizations and consumers to manage the risk and reward of commercial and financial decisions. Experian houses comprehensive databases of information, which are supported by proprietary analytical tools for interpreting this data. Experian helps organizations make critical decisions in a timely manner. Experian also helps consumers make more informed financial and purchasing decisions. Experian works with organizations across diverse industries, including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, insurance, retail and catalogue, automotive, manufacturing, leisure, utilities, e-commerce, property and government. Experian employs more than 12,500 people in over 32 countries, supporting clients in more than 60 countries with annual sales exceeding $3.1 billion.

The Situation

Experian's Business Strategies division empowers companies to profile consumers, evaluate sales versus market potential, and to target communications more effectively through tools and product offerings. One of Experian's products is a geographical business intelligence® solution, called Micromarketer. Micromarketer provides data segmentation, customer and market insight and basic mapping capabilities. To meet the continually growing demands of the global marketplace, the functionality, scalability and extendibility of Micromarketer needed to be upgraded.

Experian needed a strategic partner to:

• Develop a more robust solution to provide decision support on one common platform that is scalable across countries, data independent, and accessed on the desktop or the Web for enterprise deployment.
• Create a robust business intelligence platform that allows users to visualize, plan, analyze, and execute consumer and market analysis, profiling, forecasting and targeting.
• Accelerate time to market and shrink development efforts.
• Drive revenue and expand market share.

Paul Watts, Director of Experian's Business Strategies division, stated, "For our customers to succeed, they must have access to massive amounts of consumer insight, market and location data with no trade-offs in terms of speed, flexibility, or accuracy." Watts and his department estimated it would take almost five years of development time, to create the next generation of Micromarketer. Watts and his team realized they needed to rethink their development strategy and identify a more cost-effective and streamlined approach.

The Solution

"After evaluating our options, we realized that our core competency is developing and managing content, not building technology," said Watts. "In order to ensure a successful project we wanted a strategic partner with the expertise and passion for building world-class geographic business intelligence applications- Alteryx was the clear choice."

Experian selected the Alteryx geographic business intelligence technology as the foundation for revamping Micromarketer. Alteryx was selected to act as the product's database engine and the robust profiling engine that allows users to better understand consumer lifestyles and behaviors. Together the Alteryx tools aggregate, manipulate, and transform market and consumer data into meaningful market analyses. Watts stated, "With Alteryx technology, our customers will now have the additional flexibility to combine their existing data with Experian data assets fostering what Gartner refers to as 'Information Democracy,' providing answers and actionable insight to decision makers how, when and where they need it."

"Alteryx is hands down the only market analysis and geographic business intelligence provider around

If somebody asked me whether they should use Alteryx, my answer to them would be, yes, you should, and you will never look back again.

- Paul Thomas, Head of Retail Business Strategies Division at Experian

We can deliver products more quickly, with more features using Alteryx.

- Mark Frisch, Director of Technology Services at Experian

that could deliver the sophisticated database technology and methodology to pull this off," said Watts. "We replaced our existing desktop product in just nine months and in less than 150 days we had a Web based solution serving Experian content."

The Results

"We took advantage of themarket leading products from Alteryx to accelerate our product development and get Micromarketer rolled out quickly and into the hands of our customers," said Watts.

With strategic and development support from Alteryx, in just 18 months, Experian launched the Micromarketer Generation 3 (G3) product and made it available around the globe on both the desktop and the Web. With a 70 percent reduction in development time, Watts estimates Experian saved more than 10,000 man hours of work. And because Experian's product is now data independent, it allows Experian customers to work with any data content regardless of source, format or country of origin.

"Alteryx has opened up tremendous revenue opportunities for us as we can now deliver MicromarketerG3 across all our markets and we can support all platforms: desktop, network and Web deployments required to implement and access business content," said Watts. "They've helped us liberate our content which is required for our customers." This flexibility empowers Experian's customer base to plan, analyze and execute consumer and market analysis, targeting and decision support worldwide. Users can analyze their corporate data with Experian data assets for a 360 degree view of consumers. Customers can be more diligent and thoroughly understand opportunities, market nuances, and competition based on user defined geography data. With Alteryx as the underpinning technology, MicromarketerG3 allows customers to perform extensive research on any geography world-wide. Using the Alteryx segmentation neutral system, Experian customers can work with Experian's MosaicTM segmentation framework for any country. The Alteryx engines and application templates enable Experian to deliver state-of-the-art solutions to their clients, meeting the growing demand for geographic business intelligence solutions.

"We wanted to give our customers a data independent and geography independent solution that gives them the ability to quickly perform business-critical analytics across the globe," said Watts. "We were falling behind the curve before teaming up with Alteryx. Now we are miles ahead of our competition."

• Reduced development time of MicromarketerG3, shrinking it from 5 years to 18 months.
• Reallocated 12 developers from the original Micromarketer team to other strategic projects.
• MicromarketerG3 is more comprehensive and gives customers the ability to understand targeted consumers and markets, define customer catchment areas, analyze sales territories, perform data modeling, conduct market forecasting, and visualize actionable insight in content-rich reports.
• Increased market share with the development of a powerful data independent and country independent product that easily accesses, manipulates and transforms data from any source or geography.
• MicromarketerG3 is optimized for maximum speed and flexibility, allowing users to access data in a desktop, network, or Web-based environment.
• A simplified application interface where customers can conduct valuable consumer and market analyses based on hundreds of variables.