Summary
Our client, a commercial fleet fuel card provider engaged DDC AS to provide an automated and bespoke data dashboard which gathered highly relevant market information – to help them understand their market, identify opportunities and accurately gauge how their service was being perceived.
This provided the client with a highly relevant manageable body of information that was used to help make informed strategic decisions, identify opportunities, add tremendous value and enhance their competitive advantage in the industry.
Background
The client is an organisation operating a commercial fleet fuel card. Their position as a frontrunner in the market has enabled them to provide their clients with instant ongoing access to a range of fuels, products and business services.
Their ‘Efficient Management Tool’ allows for straightforward payment processing and reporting. It also empowers their clients (fleet managers) to keep control of their fuel costs sustainably.
The Challenge
Due to increased financial and environmental pressures, and the volatile fuel prices, fleet managers have become extremely sensitive to cost, which has made them highly likely to change suppliers to get a more competitive fuel rate. This isn’t helped by the abundance of fleet fuel card providers in the market, making the market incredibly saturated with competition.
This growing customer churn consequently made it essential to provide better standards of service along with competitive prices to ensure customer retention over the long term for our client. However, a subsequent effect of this was large amounts of corporate movement in the industry, leading to mergers, acquisitions and closures. The complex nature of the fleet management sector also led to vast amounts of information published on forums, social media and newsfeeds. Huge amounts of unstructured data sources were hazing the vision of our client and it was indigestible for their team.
The client wanted to harvest this immense weight of content and use it to understand the market, identify opportunities and accurately gauge how their service was being perceived. In addition, they sought to gain vital real-time information about their competitors, real-time data on economic indicators and news surrounding the sector thus allowing the client to be more responsive to their clients’ requirements and presenting the powerful capability to act quickly upon any instances of predatory pricing or collusion in the industry.
The Solution
A solution was designed, developed and deployed to extract and harmonise data from mentions and information relating to the brand name and service across a multitude of diverse sources across the web. Once located, we extracted this data, processed it and presented this crucial intelligence to the client through meaningful visualisations in a customisable dashboard. This allowed them to gain valuable insights to help them to stay at the forefront of the market.
By tapping into the wealth of information from open sources on the internet, DDC AS tirelessly enabled the client to continuously monitor brand perception and get insights delivered to their inbox in the form of ‘Need to Knows’ (NtKs), which offer pertinent, high relevancy alerts designed and tuned to ensure important information is delivered instantly to client inboxes. Unlike other alerts, DDC AS’ NtKs are specifically designed to minimise false positives, thus recipients only receive highly relevant messages when necessary.
In addition, our insights platform (we call this OneView) allowed the client to accurately measure their own performance against their competitors by utilising the benchmark feature on the same range of subjects, whether that be service, deployment or customer service.
This Provided them with key information to help develop and improve their services and to quickly respond to market sentiment and expectations.
Results
With the utilisation of DDC AS’ solutions, the client was able to gain new insight into qualitative information that is extremely difficult to obtain with other products incumbent in the market and traditional business intelligence tools.
These insights included:
- Competitor insight, prices and sentiment towards their brand. A range of social platforms reflected a plethora of positive comments for specific features of their service, therefore allowing their team to focus on maintaining these aspects of the business.
- How their target audience were reacting and communicating about their brand, its products and services and specific campaigns or promotions. The client’s marketing team gained the powerful ability to precisely target future promotions to a set demographic.
- How their products and services were being used and where problems or gaps in their services that they offered emerged.
- Opportunities within the market. Excitingly, through the utilisation of our data solutions, the company was the first investor in a certain branch of R and D following a relaxation of some regulation in the industry.
- Expansion plans in the transport sector. OneView helped the company to identify new sales opportunities and trends in purchases across the sector.
- Early indicators that key customers may be struggling commercially which allowed pro-active changes to trading terms to mitigate commercial risk in the event of customer failure.
The client gained critical information from the analysis, which had a direct impact on their business ventures. Based on real-time feeds on their brand and relevant holistic news of the industry, their account managers were able to prioritise their customers and take the correct approach whether that be to rescue business or expand the account, radically improving customer experiences and improving loyalty. The effective gathering, filtering and presenting of industry statistics and relevant data even meant that they became a ‘thought’ leader through the publication of reports and white papers on their findings.
The client was therefore able to use our OneView tool as an interactive and powerful window into a world of overwhelming data, previously presented as a haze. DDC AS constantly updated OneView which provided the client with a highly relevant manageable body of information that was used to help make informed strategic decisions, identify opportunities, add tremendous value and enhance their competitive advantage in the industry.
Goals achieved
- Elevated existing customer experience
- Gathered accurate, up-to-date client feedback
- Precisely targeted future marketing campaigns
- Identification of new sales opportunities
- Identification of new sector opportunities
- Mitigation of risk