Retina B2

Integration of Demand Generation 2.0 — Cisco’s largest marketing infrastructure overhaul in a decade.

Situation

Cisco had consolidated a majority of its marketing functions into a Global Demand Center (GDC) running traditional and digital marketing with the support of a Marketing Automation platform, comprising nearly 40 integrated marketing applications.

Its outbound campaign tool, responsible for email and call center campaigns, was no longer keeping up with demand. Cisco was deploying approximately 5,000 tactics a quarter and had over 100 campaign execution specialists running selection, segmentation, nurturing, offer management, lead qualification, lead routing, etc. on ePiphany – a technology past its prime.

To handle what was deemed to be a very large volume of campaigns, Cisco had selected and purchased Unica three years prior from IBM (now, Unica is an HCL Software). At that time, Unica was the leading technology, especially when it came to large volumes of campaigns, contacts, and offers. The implementation project, however, was far behind schedule and over budget.

Solution

To bring the Unica implementation/integration project back on track, Cisco looked for a true expert with both the Unica technology and implementation of marketing platforms in general.

Retina rebooted the entire Unica implementation project from scratch, this time with clear requirements, an expertly devised architecture, and solid project management methodology.

Retina experts devised separate tracks for the technical (re)implementation, the data integration, the changeover procedures, and the training of personnel with the new technology. Each track was managed based on the assumption that the other tracks will succeed, and progress and backlog was monitored closely, shifting expert resources to the areas in need.

As the Cisco marketing organization is global, a change management team (or “tiger team”) was formed to assist with support and ramping up post-implementation in each geography with a concentration of marketing personnel: North and South America, EMEA, India, China, and APAC.

Outcomes

Even though the original project, prior to engaging Retina, failed repeatedly for three years, we were able to complete the implementation and go live globally within 6 months. This implementation created the largest known implementation of IBM Unica ever, for which Retina was awarded an excellence prize at the Monaco Marketing Automation Summit the same year.

Anecdotally, the implementation was so successful that most people in the GDC wondered if it really went live, as nobody was “seen running down the corridors with their hair on fire.” As a matter of fact, for the next six months after go live, only one bug was submitted to the support team.

Creating a dynamic, emotional, unified positioning and messaging platform for the Gibco brand.

Situation

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a global leader in scientific instrumentation, reagents and consumables, and software and services to healthcare, life science, and other laboratories. A Fortune 500 company, the organization employs over 75,000 people and generates annual revenue of ~$25B.

Within Thermo Fisher Scientific’s portfolio of brands is Gibco, which pioneered the science of cell culture techniques and applications nearly six decades ago. Gibco’s innovations have been instrumental in scientific advances ranging from the first cellular therapies all the way to cloning Dolly the sheep. Gibco is the market leader and generally recognized as the industry standard among biotech, academic, and pharmaceutical research professionals.

That said, the brand had somewhat stagnated in the eyes of customers and prospects. Though seen as essential and reliable, brand perceptions of Gibco’s innovation waned – as did awareness of Gibco’s extensive value beyond its products, from regulatory guidance to education to hands-on scientific support. Also absent from Gibco’s marketing was the deep emotional bond its customers have with the brand and their cells. At the same time, the brand lacked in-market consistency, as disparate marketing campaigns had proliferated different messages and visual approaches.

Solution

Retina partnered with Gibco to crystalize its value proposition and brand marketing, shift perceptions, and celebrate the science and personal connections Gibco enables.

Internal and market due diligence revealed a key insight: more than products, connections are what Gibco’s customers critically need in today’s complex and uncertain landscape. Scientific progress stems from the strength, scope, and scale of your connections. Connections between abstract ideas and concepts. Connections across research, clinical trial, and commercialization. Connections from experts to colleagues to regulatory bodies. Connections of supply chains and funding to enable and keep the science moving forward. More than anyone else, these are connections the scope and scale of Gibco empower.

Our “Connections for Life” campaign boldly challenged what customers know (or think they know) about Gibco. And it empowered them with the new knowledge of what they can achieve when they make that connection with Gibco – connecting ideas, cures, and people, across careers and lifetimes.

We also created robust brand guidelines and buyer-journey, audience-segmented messaging frameworks to empower marketing teams across the Gibco organization. So they could take the campaign to market, anywhere and everywhere they needed to be.

Outcomes

Though early to report on in-market impact, the brand campaign has instantly energized and galvanized the Gibco organization globally. Stakeholders from regions worldwide have weighted in to state they “love the execution” and that our work is “simply beautiful” and among “the most complete we’ve ever seen.”

Real-time, cross-channel, integrated offers and recommendations for digital marketing.

Situation

The Bank of Montreal (BMO) is Canada’s oldest bank, one of the top large banks in Canada, and one of the top eight banks in North America. BMO offers services in three areas: personal and commercial banking, wealth management, and investment banking. BMO employs Unica as a central component of its marketing platform, due to Unica’s exceptional capability to scale to large numbers of tactics and contacts. BMO uses Unica for inbound and outbound selection, segmentation, and personalization, as well as for campaign management. The organization has been a pioneer in implementing an integrated marketing platform and leads the market by continually evolving its modern technology ecosystem.

Emphasizing technological innovation and agility, BMO decided to expand cross-channel journeys by adding ATM and online banking as marketing conduits in order to improve customer experience, increase relevance in communications, and accelerate revenue growth.

Unica Interact, the next-best-offer and real-time personalization engine for the inbound marketing channels, needed to be configured for the additional channels and optimized to scale accordingly. The bank looked for a partner with deep technical expertise with real time personalization and recommendations to implement according to strict functional and technical requirements.

Solution

Building on our long-term relationship as a trusted advisor and technology partner, BMO selected Retina (operating as Transiris at that time) to implement the integration of the two additional channels for personalized offers and recommendations in real time.

The two additional channels, ATM and online banking, are two of the most utilized operational channels (millions of interactions daily) and are tightly connected to core banking data. To enable them as real-time marketing channels, the project focused on:

• Configuring Interact for the new complexity (configuration, data, business rules, scaling to new hardware, data and API optimization, protocol architecture, business fit)
• Developing and deploying extremely performant custom code (to the microsecond)
• Redesigning the existing architecture (especially the load balancer) to adapt to the increased volume of data, the additional security layers, and the system performance in real-time

A team of platform architects, software developers, data engineers, marketers, project managers, security specialists, and testers consisting of Retina subject matter experts and BMO staff was assembled, deployed, and continuously adapted to the needs and evolution of the project.

Over two quarters – and in record time – our BMO and Retina hybrid teams completed the solution design and re-architecture, custom code development, Unica Interact configuration and scaling, infrastructure scaling, modeling of the new data, system performance tuning and security improvements. Change management and training was also led by Retina.

As a pilot for the newly implemented cross-channel infrastructure, we also devised and deployed a new inbound campaign using real-time personalization for BMO’s Indigo gift/credit card. We designed and delivered segmentation, marcom strategy, placement, A/B testing, modeling and measurements. This campaign serves as a template for future real-time personalized offers and recommendations tactics.

Outcomes

The implementation of this project enabled the existing set of offers to be placed and personalized on the two additional channels: ATM and home banking. Customer experience has been enhanced, especially through consistency across channels and the capability of journey continuation in an omni-channel eco-system. This also leveraged existing infrastructure increasing exposure of existing, vetted offers without the need of additional creative, legal, and technical effort/budget.

Marketers gained a new tool for comprehensive cross-channel tactics aided by statistical modeling and machine learning to increase conversion rates, especially for tiered and high-profile banking products. The consolidated and integrated approach also saved duplication and allowed redeployment of operational budgets in higher value tactics.

The new features increased the number of unique new real-time marketing interactions by 23% in the 6 months following release, which generated a sizable revenue growth year over year. It also reconfirmed BMO as the leader in Digital Transformation among the North American financial institutions, with positive image enhancements in the press and among personal and commercial consumers.

Elevating thought leadership with branded content that unlocks blockchain opportunity for financial services.

Situation

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is an industry-leading information technology company that enables customers to go further, faster. From the cloud to the data center to workplace applications, HPE’s technology and services help customers around the world make their IT more efficient, more productive and more secure. Retina was selected to develop HPE’s Blockchain content strategy and communication plan.

HPE’s challenge was the opposite of what most B2B brands face: they had a wealth of top-of-the-funnel, issues-oriented content to engage businesses interested in blockchain technologies – but they lacked substantive, bottom-funnel content and were being outflanked by competitors.

Our objective was to develop a full-funnel content strategy to support HPE’s blockchain solutions that would utilize the right mix and cadence of content to identity audiences beyond the awareness stage in the financial services sector.

Solution

The “Boundaryless Blockchain” content series took a practical and prescriptive approach to help blockchain owners break through boundaries by identifying common constraints and how to prevent or resolve them. The program comprised a comprehensive library of 47 new content assets, including:

• White papers/eBooks
• Video
• Infographics
• Blog posts
• Technical papers
• Podcasts
• Influencer roundtable events at Mobile World Congress and the Blockchain Innovation Conference
• An exclusive media summit held at HPE’s new lab in Palo Alto

Outcomes

The campaign placed HPE at the pinnacle of thought leadership and made it the premium brand in the space – accelerating lead velocity and translating sale opportunities to closed business.

Upgraded ING Bank Romania from IBM Unica version 9.1.2 to version 11.1 on three in-house environments.

Situation

ING Bank Romania is a branch of ING Group, a global bank with 53,000 employees serving around 38.4 million customers, corporate clients and financial institutions in over 40 countries. Locally in Romania, the bank targets three main areas: Wholesale Banking, Mid Corporate and Retail Banking.

ING had selected IBM Unica Campaign as its outbound campaign management tool. But due to its large volume of data and its focus on privacy and security, the bank had been continuously working on keeping up to date with the internal security regulations, GDPR compliance and latest enhancements of their technologies.

As a result, ING’s Unica instances became outdated; they missed key capabilities that were added in later versions; and, with the announcement of HCL’s end-of-support for version 9.1.2, ING required a critical upgrade.

Solution

Retina, with our deep experience in banking and proven capabilities with several enterprise marketing management technologies, including IBM Unica, was charged with coordinating the Unica upgrade project.

For maximum efficiency and quality assurance, the upgrade plan comprised two phases. We started by establishing the hardware, software and security requirements, and creating the upgrade procedure. Moreover, in order to guarantee the solution functioned properly, we also created a series of functional, integration and performance test cases.

Phase two implemented the Unica upgrade from version 9.1.2 to 11.1, configurations required in order to maintain the existing functionalities untouched, new security configurations and the pre-planned testing on three environments. The upgrade steps incorporated the installation, configuration and sanity check for each of the four versions required for a successful upgrade (10.0, 10.1, 11.0.1 and 11.1).

Outcomes

The project went flawlessly, uninterrupted and bug-free. Furthermore, it was completed, including the user acceptance, in under two months. The upgrade now affords ING inviolable security, more performant environments and new Unica capabilities.

What’s more, the initiative reinforced ING’s partnership with Retina, leading to additional projects that will help maintain ING’s standing as one of Europe’s leading financial institutions.

Improving the digital customer experience and boosting sales with a multiplatform chatbot.

Situation

Audi makes some of the world’s most incredible performance vehicles and is driving progress in mobility with its transformative electric vehicles and autonomous technology. When Audi rolled into Retina, they sought to deliver a digital shopping experience as innovative as their automobiles.

The mobile-empowered consumer can research do their research online, 24/7. In fact, approximately 80% of today’s car buyers come to a dealership knowing what they want. Yet, the process of test driving a car is often still surprisingly analog.

Booking a test drive can involve back-and-forth emailing and calling that can take a lot of time and create opportunities for human error or customer abandonment. Audi charged Retina with developing a solution to accelerate the booking process, increase conversions and increase customer satisfaction.

Solution

We developed a powerful yet extremely intuitive chatbot to help customers book a car for a test drive on Audi’s websites or via Facebook Messenger. Like a chat, the bot asks what kind of car a buyer is interested in (model, transmission, fuel efficiency) – and it connects to Audi’s booking platform and their fleet of available cars. A buyer caneven carry on a conversation across platforms, beginning the chat on a mobile phone and then picking it back up on desktop, in the same spot!

The chatbot assistant can:

• Help the car buyer select the features of the car they want to test, generally presented as packages
• Provide the closest location where a car with the specifications is available
• Automatically book a guaranteed time slot with an Audi agent for the test drive

After the chatbot books the test drive, a local sales representative receives an alert and calls the customer to further confirm the appointment. The bot can also offer discounts on the new car or aftermarket services.

The chatbot is also an incredible customer intelligence tool, gathering valuable insights throughout the process. With a simple cookie, Audi can learn what customers did after booking a test drive. Do they look at other models? Did they check out pricing or additional features? More than just a talker, our chatbot is a teacher.

Outcomes

Customers embraced the chatbot for its convenience, effectiveness, and novelty. In the first month in use, it increased booked appointments by 80%, and customers come to the dealership with the perception that they step into a novel experience with Audi.

Audi continues to be one of the most innovative automotive brands on the planet. Thanks to our chatbot, it also delivers one of the most technologically advanced and seamless customer experiences available to car buyers.