National Education Association Member Benefits Selects Harte-Hanks For Member-Centric Direct Marketing Initiative
Tuesday, 03 October 2006
Harte-Hanks, Inc., worldwide direct and targeted marketing company, today announced that long-time client and partner, NEA (National Education Association) Member Benefits, has chosen Harte-Hanks to apply its “Customer Optimization” planning framework to help the organization become more member-centric by managing customer contacts and leveraging customer information to drive communications and interactions across multiple channels.
As part of the engagement, Harte-Hanks will build a hosted Allink database solution. The engagement is designed to help the organization re-engineer its marketing strategy and business processes to understand, manage and leverage member data more fully, and to better serve its members by building participation in the NEA Member Benefits program. The Harte-Hanks solution is designed to expand the value of NEA Member Benefits current, installed customer database.
“Re-engineering a member-driven organization like ours can fail without the strategy, business processes, and infrastructure in place to support its long-term growth,” said Steve Levy, vice president of marketing, NEA Member Benefits. “To achieve this growth, we are partnering on a focused and sustained basis with Harte-Hanks, given its extensive history working with affinity marketing organizations. Applying the Harte-Hanks Customer Optimization methodology ensures we maximize use of new and proven tools, technologies and business practices of Harte-Hanks as we recast our organizational operations and culture to be more member-centric than ever.”
For more than ten years, Harte-Hanks and NEA Member Benefits have worked together to build strong member relationships through the development and ongoing support of an installed multichannel member database, Levy said. This past work has allowed NEA Member Benefits to drive portions of its member communications.
“The rapid adoption of the Internet and devices by consumers is reestablishing many of today’s accepted norms,” said Kathy Calta, corporate officer and senior vice-president, Harte-Hanks. “Consumers expect to get what they want, when they want it. This paradigm shift presents new challenges to marketers as their organizations begin to embrace new digital sales and service channels. Our clients recognize and are quickly adopting customer-centric strategies that focus on socializing customer information throughout the enterprise to ensure profitable sales success. Customer Optimization helps our clients achieve the highest balance between customer satisfaction and business profitability.”
Customer Optimization
Customer Optimization is the Harte-Hanks proprietary framework for enhancing the customer experience while increasing customer value. It takes into account the numerous trade-off decisions companies must make every day to deliver against multiple and even conflicting business objectives. By focusing on Customer Optimization, Harte-Hanks seeks to help companies by applying their finite resources in an optimal manner across all inbound and outbound channels.
Harte-Hanks Customer Optimization helps clients to:
Understand and predict current and potential customer needs and behavior patterns across all channels,
Develop and execute plans to interact with customers and prospects in a manner that delivers what they need, when they need it, and how they want it,
· Leverage inbound (e-mail, call center, fulfillment) and outbound (mail, Web, and in-store display) customer interaction points fully to deliver an optimal experience,
Transform data and analysis into business intelligence for marketing and across the enterprise, and
Apply the appropriate staff, business processes, technology and data content to meet requirements.
“The customer is the center of focus here, not the product or the brand, and while some marketers have begun to recognize and appreciate this new paradigm, the reality of customer-centricity and delivering relevance at the individual consumer level can be quite daunting,” Calta said. “Data are the foundation for Customer Optimization, which prescribes that companies leverage customer information to build and deliver an intentional and mutually satisfactory experience. By gathering, analyzing, sharing and responding to data in ways that strengthen the brand/customer relationship, an organization such as the NEA increases the value of its members and leverages information continuously to drive business and marketing improvement.”