Online Credit Monitoring Company

StatSlice Helps a Leading Online Credit Monitoring Company in its Mission to Use Analytics as a Competitive Advantage

The Background – Faster and Better Data Visibility Needed

This Texas-based company provides full-service online credit monitoring services to its customers by placing a customer’s personalized credit information at their fingertips. Founded in 2000, the company made its mark on the industry by offering education and tools so that their clients can make good decisions and take control of their financial health.  Like any other online company, data accessibility is at the core of their business. Without visibility into the data, management would be driving blind. Customer information must be collected, analyzed, and converted into actionable insight for every aspect of the business. Important characteristics include customer clicks, page performance testing, impressions, customer conversions, revenue per sale projections, customer billing rate, and cancellation rate.

Marketing program managers who oversee ad word campaigns want to closely monitor their results.  The value of keywords and phrases changes frequently based on market dynamics. Therefore, a real-time bidding system for purchasing links (clicks) is the model most often employed by major vendors such as Google.  Measuring the effectiveness of a single customer campaign can be challenging, but the challenge is exponentially greater for a manager of multiple online advertising campaigns.

The company collects extensive data providing solid measurements on the effectiveness of individual advertising campaigns and aggregate reporting across all those campaigns.

A key component in the company’s success has been applying the best available technology to solve their various challenges.   From the company’s inception, management realized they had outgrown cumbersome report building from their production databases.

The Solution – A BI System, a Data Mart, Data Extraction and Interactive Reporting

The company decided to take on the challenge of creating effective reports and analysis tools for managing their advertising campaigns. Their approach included building a business intelligence system, a data mart, data extraction tools, and interactive reporting.  The IT team, led by the CIO, began developing this BI system in-house.  They quickly realized that outside help was needed and brought in StatSlice to complete the system and take it to production. The project requirements were as follows:

• Complete the development of the company’s data warehouse and take it to production
• Create analytical capabilities to enable the marketing analysts to slice and dice marketing costs, return on investment, profitability and sales volume
• Put together a daily automatic validation system to ensure ongoing data quality control
• Replace the existing cumbersome reporting with the new data warehouse-based reporting

The StatSlice Approach

StatSlice focuses on hiring experienced consultants who have completed several successful BI implementations and can perform well under pressure. This paid off in the situation that One Technologies was facing and the StatSlice team was able to start showing results very quickly once they were brought on board. The team took the following approach:

• First, StatSlice performed a review of the existing implementation as compared to BI best practices and the design that would be best suited for the client’s situation
• Second, StatSlice proposed a plan to address the shortcomings of the existing unacceptable solution
• Then using the StatSlice development methodology, they segmented the project and estimated its scope, time and costs

The Statslice team followed built this solution using the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform including SSIS, SSAS and SSRS.

The Results – A Low Cost, Solid Reporting Foundation

The StatSlice team met the challenges posed by One Technologies’ management and took the BI system to production quickly and successfully.  Here were some of the results:

• Built a process for daily automatic validation involving a review of complex data elements to help the client feel confident in the data and avoid wasted time on data validation
• Replaced the existing reporting system with a less-cumbersome, more intuitive, and more capable platform
• Provided all the existing functionality in addition to “slicing and dicing” capabilities
• Enabled the business analysts to make faster and better decisions because they could estimate profitability more accurately and quickly than before

As a result of the successful implementation, StatSlice built up the company’s BI team and has been engaged for multiple years expanding the BI infrastructures in multiple subject areas.

Summary

The Challenge

Data accessibility is at the core of this rapidly growing business. The needed more data visibility—without it they were “driving blind.”  As the business grew, managing and measuring the effectiveness of their customers’ campaigns was becoming nearly impossible.

The Solution

The StatSlice team was able to quickly steer the company towards several BI and Analytics best practices and built a design best suited for their requirements.  The project was organized into multiple, reasonable phases that could be estimated and scheduled.

The Result

StatSlice got daily and scheduled processes up and running very quickly.  The prior reporting system was replaced with a better platform which gave them added functionality in a faster time frame with vastly improved results.

Industry

Online Marketing and Advertising

© 2013 StatSlice Systems. All rights reserved.  This case study is for informational purposes only.  StatSlice makes no warranties, express or implied, in this document.

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Case Study: Online Credit Monitoring Company