CATEGORY: Data Mining and Visualization
REVIEWER: Sarah Van Dyck, vice president of Marketing for etrieve, Inc.
BACKGROUND: etrieve, Inc. is focused on making the mobile phone the natural extension of the office. With etrieve, mobile business professionals can manage their office e-mail by voice, text and importance allfrom the phone they already have. etrieve combines its wireless interchange engine with the reach of wireless technology and robust text-to- speech technology to keep mobile business professionals connected with their critical office information.
PLATFORMS: digiMine Services is a hosted data warehousing, data mining and business intelligence solution. The digiMine data center is built on the Microsoft Windows 2000 platform, using Microsoft SQL Server and Commerce Server. digiMine customers access business intelligence reports via standard Web browsers.
PROBLEM SOLVED: etrieve’s service enables mobile professionals to access and manage their e- mail any time, anywhere, by any phone. A key to our success is making service registration simple and ensuring high customer satisfaction once customers have signed on. In particular, we wanted to identify any bottlenecks or ambiguities on our Web site, especially in the registration process. We also required a solution that would integrate multiple data sources so we could track both online data and offline etrieve service usage data. We needed a way to fully assess and measure all of our customer interactions, from Web site activity to how customers actually use the etrieve service. Finally, the solution had to be easy to deploy and affordable. digiMine Services met these needs.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: etrieve sends its Web server logs and service usage data to the digiMine data center over the Internet via a secure, automated process. digiMine provides us with timely, reliable reports on how people use our Web site, customer demographics and service usage patterns. With digiMine, we can observe which times of day are our site’s most active, how users came to etrieve.com and which site sections are most popular. Most importantly, digiMine analysis helps us identify ways to refine our registration process and improve customer acquisition. digiMine also provides detailed analysis of how customers use the etrieve service. By warehousing and applying data mining to our customer database and usage logs, digiMine enables us to identify customer segments customers with common usage and demographic attributes. With digiMine, we have an improved understanding of our customers and can intelligently enhance our marketing, service feature development and customer service efforts. Soon, etrieve will use digiMine for marketing campaign management. digiMine will analyze and report on the success of different online and offline etrieve marketing efforts by tracking
STRENGTHS: digiMine’s ability to link and analyze both online Web data and offline service usage data is idealfor etrieve. Also, digiMine delivers powerful data mining more than just basic statistics to provide valuable business intelligence about the effectiveness of our Web site and about our customer base. Additionally, digiMine Services were fast and easy to deploy. In less than a week, digiMine was warehousing, analyzing and reporting on etrieve data.
WEAKNESSES: digiMine provides such depth of analysis that some reports can be overwhelming. An embedded help system currently under development at digiMine would make some of the more complex digiMine reports more powerful and easier to use.
SELECTION CRITERIA: Only digiMine was able to provide the breadth and depth of analysis and reporting at an affordable monthly service fee. Also, digiMine was a good fit for etrieve because deployment and ongoing use of the service had a minimal impact on our IT staff. As a service provider, digiMine handles virtually all of the hardware, software and network management.
DELIVERABLES: digiMine provides etrieve with numerous graphicalreports. Site usage reports provide an overview of our Web traffic, referralsites, clickstream analysis and key word searches. Customer analysis reports give us demographic, psychographic and recency/frequency trends and statistics. Registration analysis reports tell us registration and abandonment rates. Data mining reports provide customer segments, common usage combinations, common user properties and more.
VENDOR SUPPORT: digiMine’s client support is proactive and personal. Prior to deployment, digiMine provided us with an in-depth orientation and training session. Thus far, all of our questions and needs have been addressed quickly and effectively.
DOCUMENTATION: digiMine’s existing documentation is helpful and easy to understand. We are lookingforward to the addition of embedded, online help within reports.
Source: DM Review / PDF