In 2002 a couple of us left the consultancy to help customers move beyond transactional infrastructure, which is really what ‘CRM’ was about at the time, to create high value solution on top, and to create the organizational and commercial ownership of the customer needed to consistently drive value from data, inventing the concept of Customer Value Management which is now universally implemented by telcos across the world and increasingly adopted by other industries.

1. Customer Value Management (CVM), including acquisition, churn, cross-sell, segmentation, and more, across online and offline channels and industries, both B2C and B2B.
2. Customer Experience and Advocacy, including Net Promoter System and Net Promoter Economics, customer journey optimization, and customer experience.
3. Innovation and Growth, including data-driven product and proposition development, data monetisation, and distribution and sales strategy.

For our customers, CVM projects typically deliver additional 5% EBITDA growth annually, which you can measure very robustly because much of it is direct marketing. Experience and Advocacy projects typically deliver in the region of 20% EBITDA improvement to our clients, but it is harder to measure accurately because you must go above the line for this level of impact. And for Innovation and Growth, the sky is the limit.

As for the name, we founded the company in 2002 and wanted a short domain name that was a real word. It turned out to be difficult to find an available, short ‘.com’ at the peak of the dot-bomb era! We settled on ‘cybaea’ which my Latin dictionary translated as ‘trading vessel’; historically, it was a type of merchant ship of Greek origin, common in the Mediterranean, which Cicero describes as “most beautiful and richly adorned”. We always say we want to change the name, but it never happens; I guess if it was good enough for Cicero, then it is good enough for us.

This was working with Bupa Global; a Bupa business unit that primarily provides international private medical insurance for 2 million customers living in over 195 different countries. Towards the end of 2013, Bupa Global set out on a strategic journey to deliver sustained growth. A key element of this was the design and launch of a completely new set of products and propositions, replacing the existing portfolio, with the objective of attracting and servicing new customer segments, complying with changing regulation and meeting customer expectations.

The strategic driver was therefore very much in the Innovation and Growth space we outlined above, and I joined Bupa’s global Leadership Team to create and lead the commercial insights function that would support this change with deep understanding of the target customers and the markets in which they live. Additionally, Bupa had very high ambitions for its Net Promoter programme (Experience and Advocacy) where we delivered the most advanced installation across the global business, and for Customer Value Management we demonstrated nearly 2% reduction in the Claims line (EBITDA) from one single project.

For the new propositions, we initially interviewed over 3,000 individuals on five continents to understand value- and purchase drivers, researched 195 markets to size demand across all customer segments, and further deep-dived into key markets to understand the competitors with products, features, and prices, as well as the regulatory environment, and distribution options. This was supported by a very practical Customer Lifetime Value model, which we developed.

Suffice to say that in two years we had designed and implemented a completely new set of propositions and taken them live in more than twenty priority markets where they replaced the old products.

The strategic and commercial results were clearly delivered. But when I asked our CEO what he thought was the main contribution of the team and the new insights function, he focused on trust: “Every major strategic decision we made was backed by robust data and deep insights in which the executive team had full confidence.”

In a period of change, trust is perhaps the key currency. Trust that you are doing the right things for the right reasons, and the ability to explain why that is. This is key to get everybody behind the changes that need to happen. This is what the scientific method applied to data, analytics, and insights can bring to a commercial organization, and it inspires me to continue what we are doing.

The main trend that excites me now is the breakthroughs happening in Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing, expanding the impact of data into completely new areas. This is great for consumers and for those companies that are at the leading edge of analytics and insights. For other organizations, however, who are struggling to deliver value from data, it means that the gap between where they are versus best practice is widening exponentially, which is a big worry.

The second is to not under-estimate the business change that is needed to exploit the insights. Analytical leaders have appetite for change and they plan and resource accordingly. Data and models are only part of the project to deliver the value and they are really clear on this.

Which gets to a second pitfall. When thinking about generating value from data, many want to do it all themselves. And I understand why: after all, data may well be a strategic asset for your organization.

But when you recruit, you should be clear in your mind if you are recruiting to deliver the change of creating the first models and changed business processes, or if you are recruiting to sustain the change by keeping the models current and incrementally improving the insights and processes. These two outcomes require people with quite different skills and vastly different temperaments.

We call them Explorers versus Farmers.

For the first, you want commercially-focused business people who can drive change in the organization; who can make things work quickly, whether that is data, analytics, or business processes, to demonstrate value; and who are supremely comfortable with uncertainties and unknowns.

For the second, you want people who are technically skilled to deliver and maintain the optimal stable platform and who love doing incremental improvements to technology, data, and business processes.

Explorers versus Farmers. Call them what you will, but note that they are different.

The do-nothing approach can make sense. Not, however, when it is adopted because management fears change (change will happen, regardless) or because they feel they don’t understand data (everybody understands data if it is communicated well). Those companies are just leaving money on the table: every organization have quick wins that can deliver value in weeks.

But it may be that you have no capacity for change and have made the informed decision that data and analytics must wait, reflecting the commercial reality. The key here is ‘informed’ and the follow-on question is if there are other ways that the company can realise some of the value from data right now.

The second approach at least recognises the value potential of data and aims to move the organization towards realising that value. But it is back to those ‘business translator’ roles we discussed before and making sure you have them, as well as making sure the business is aligned around the change that will be needed. Making money from data is a business function, not a technical one, and the function that drives the change must sit within the commercial business, not in IT or some other department that is still an arms-length support function.

We see the best organizations, the analytical leaders, employing flexible approaches. They focus on the outcomes and they have a sense of urgency driven from the top. They make it work.

Our analytics-as-a-service offering is for organizations of any size who want to realise value from data and insights right now, but who are not yet ready to build their own internal teams. We partner with the commercial teams to be their (commercial) insights function and deliver not just reports but real business change. Customers can pay monthly, pay for results, or we can do a build-operate-transfer model.

One of our first projects was with a small telco. They were too small to maintain a strong analytical team in-house, purely because of scale. We set up a monthly workshop with the commercial Marketing team. We analysed their data offline and used the time for a structured conversation about the new campaigns and the new changes to the web site they should implement this month. We would point them to our reports and dashboards which had models, graphs, t-tests, and p-values in abundance, but would focus the conversation on moving the business forward.

The following month we would repeat and identify new campaigns and new changes. After six months, they had more than 20 highly effective and precisely targeted campaigns running, and we handed over the maintenance (‘farming’) of the models to their IT teams. It is a model that works well across industries.

But practically, we are seeing more success from deep learning. We have found that once an organization successfully implements one solution, whether artificial intelligence or complex natural language processing, then they want more. It is that powerful and that transformational, and breakthroughs in these fields are further expanding the impact into completely new area. My advice is that most organizations should at least trial what these approaches can do for them, and we have set up a sister-organization to develop and deliver solutions here.

Second, I am looking to identify the right partners and associates for Cybaea here in the UK to allow us to grow the business. We have great assets in our methodologies, clients, and people, and a tremendous opportunity for delivering commercial value from data, so I am very excited for the future.