Case study: Ergon Energy
A relatively new player in Queensland's energy market, Ergon Energy was founded in 1998 and invested in its first business intelligence system in late 2000.
Its goal was to develop new marketing strategies by drawing on information in its customer data warehouse in new ways.
After months of planning and testing, Ergon selected Brio's Brio Intelligence platform, and purchased seven licenses for a pilot test that began in June 2001.
The company's first test of the technology came as it sought to identify those of its 570,000 customers who were using relatively expensive methods of account payment, such as credit cards, and encourage them to use cheaper methods such as direct debit.
By pulling data from the Oracle data warehouse and overlaying it on top of geo-demographic information sourced from specialist marketing firm Pacific Micromarketing, Ergon was able to get a detailed picture of which customers were using which payment methods, where they lived, what life stages they were in, and so on.
The system provided enough information that Ergon was able to successfully target its customers with an individualised campaign that took different approaches for different types of customers.
-We wanted to find out what our customers looked like, and understand them a lot better in order to market some non-energy products [such as water heaters and green energy] to them," says Ben Verdon, retail business analyst with Ergon.
-By looking at the way customers were paying, we were able to suggest better payment methods that would suit their needs and benefit Ergon. Nobody knew what our customer base looked like before, but with Brio within 20 minutes we were able to generate lists of who was doing what."
That one campaign delivered an immediate ROI of more than 6000 percent, and Ergon has since expanded its use of Brio as it works to build out a larger corporate data warehouse due in production by November on a two-CPU Sun Microsystems Enterprise 450 Server. The data warehouse is growing at 500MB a week and is expected to top 100GB soon.
Even in its developing form, the system is already being used to compare metrics between salespeople, which was never possible and has -opened a few eyes", Verdon says.
-We wanted quick wins and the system has provided them. The best thing is that it will provide the ability to have a holistic view of the customer, and to be able to find similar customers who fit the same demographic profiles but haven't bought anything else from Ergon. There's a constant driver to understand our customers better."
