Paul Writer launches Innovative Marketer Dialogue, 
Video interview series with CMOs highlights marketing best practices
Sanjay Tripathy
Senior Executive Vice President- Head Marketing, Product and Direct Channels
HDFC Life
On Big Data, Mobile and Social and how is it being used by Britannia?
Big data has been there for a very long time. Big data also means analytics so it actually helps you to get more insights from the customers by looking at the transactions closely. Being a financial services company, we have multiple transactions taking place and have a huge database since we have more than 5 million customers. Their information is accessible to us so we can produce analytics. We produce meaningful models out of it, we have done a lot of work in the past across cell model beat, predictive analytics in terms of understanding what is the likelihood of buying a particular policy by a customer, which policy appeals to him the most? Using the predictive analytics, we can understand which customers are likely to lapse and can therefore help us stop that. We’ve also done surrender models by which we can understand the groups of customers who are likely to surrender and who are not.
In the last two years, with social media and the mobile data coming in, it has helped us get more information about the customer. At the same time if you look at this information via social media, it is currently not linked to my existing customer information because unless a customer gives me social media access, I am not able to link this purchase behavior with his engagement behaviour on social media. What will be important going into the future is how to really link both parts of the behaviour. First is the customer data on purchase behavior which we have access to and use for the purpose of analytics. The other is the social part of the customer behavior happening on social media which you are actually capturing through a different tool beat. This includes your listening tools when people are talking about your brand or beat on their social space like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
How to really link both the social information and our database to create meaningful insights so it will help in creating better marketing programs while bringing out new products, that’s the next stage which we are currently working on, probably by next year we will be in a much better position to really use that and make the most for our brand.
