Actuate

CLIENT: Actuate
SERVICE: Writing a white paper

MARKETING BACKGROUND: To help position itself in a new market sector, that of Information Delivery, Actuate wanted an in-depth guide that provided a credible, educational tool. Writing Machine delivered the copy and has now updated it, to reflect changes in both the Actuate solution and the market demand.

In practice: Serving the customer

Customers have always been a company’s most valuable asset. This remains as true today as ever. What has changed, though, is the fact that technology now enables companies to add value to their customer interactions in ways that were previously impossible.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) describes the process of tapping into the different clusters of customer data and mining them for the precious knowledge that can make the process of serving those customers smoother. Armed with such knowledge, companies gain an improved understanding of their customers’ needs – providing an insight into all manner of potential cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. This not only serves to increase revenues but also can help develop more personalised relationships with customers.

An Information Delivery solution is the ideal tool for leveraging CRM processes and applications in business situations where information plays an important role in the interaction between a company and its customers. It enables organisations to provide customers with exactly the information they want, when they want it, and in the format they want it in.

Such targeted, relevant information benefits the customer as much as the company. If they can receive up-to-date information relating directly to their own situations – even something as simple as how much they spend in a month on certain products – the experience will be that much more personal and rewarding.

Personalised relationships deliver long-term advantages for everyone.

Case study: Investing in information

When it comes to financial matters, everyone likes to be kept informed. That’s why Close Wealth Management Ltd, a member of Close Brothers Group plc (an independent merchant banking group listed on the London Stock Exchange) chose to implement an Actuate solution to enable it to deliver reports to individual investors, trusts, pension funds and charities.

"We needed a platform that would enable us to provide fairly distinctive reports for our customers," explains John Allison, IT and Operations Director for Close Wealth Management. "Having worked with a number of reporting tools in the past, I felt that Actuate alone was able to provide the functionality we needed."

The company currently produces customer reports on a monthly and quarterly basis. "It was important for us that we could offer the same format of report both in our monthly online reports and in the printed versions we send out quarterly," Allison says. "Actuate enabled us to do this, as well as to create summaries, and include text and graphics alongside the pure financial data."

"We plan to roll out interactive reporting using Actuate during the 4th Quarter, which will involve further integration with our current CRM capability"

As well as being able to control the way the customer sees the information, the Actuate solution has proved invaluable in terms of streamlining the reporting process. "We are now able to run all reports for all our clients within just one day at month end or quarter end. The output is a single large file, of about 100,000 pages, which we can upload or send to the printers. Thanks to the security controls within Actuate, clients accessing the information online only see what is relevant to them."

Such is the success of this reporting process that the majority of Close Wealth clients use reports as their main interaction with the company." This has meant that personal contact with our clients is now much more productive, because they are satisfied with the information they receive. Contact can focus on their additional requirements, potentially generating additional revenues for the firm."