Michael Gibson provides us with his own interesting twist on Customer Analytics in another of our Guest Posts from Australian Universities (you can read all previous guest posts here)
Michael is Data Warehouse Manager at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.
Last week I attended a 2 day Customer Analytics seminar up the road in Melbourne where one of our academics was presenting. The free tickets were offered to me because my responsibility in BI seemed to be a close match (and because I suspect they needed to fill a few vacant seats). While we don’t do anything directly in this space at Deakin, I still wanted to attend because I have used BI to do some of this stuff in the past, I have a background in marketing, and I’m always looking to learn new things and expand my horizons.
While some of the presentations were only partly relevant or simplistic, there were a couple that caused me to think about how the concepts could be applied in Higher Education – and I have to say that some of the ideas match quite closely to some important issues previously identified by Universities.
Customer Analytics (sometimes called Customer Insights) is a relatively new discipline that seeks to understand customer behaviour by analysing primary and secondary sources of data in order to predict future behaviour (an established practice we might know as Predictive Analytics).
People automatically assume this is used by the private sector to work out how to extract more money from our pockets, but this is only partially true. Organisations also use this technology to improve social outcomes and drive greater operational efficiencies. Some examples were given by a few government departments (inlc. the ATO).
You’d be surprised at how many (usually large) organisations are doing this currently. The Insurance industry is going crazy over this stuff at the moment, partially to understand how high they can set your premiums before you decide to leave them (which they like to call pricing optimisation).
What does this mean for Higher Ed? Well, by creating a ‘Student Insights’ function and better understanding students, universities can realistically achieve some of the goals they always seem to be banging on about, including;
- Lowering attrition rates
- Increasing academic performance of students
- Better targeted courses and units
- Better employment outcomes
- Delivering better services to students
- Process improvement / operational efficiencies
- Converting enquiries into enrolments
- Attracting desirable students through more effective marketing
Some Unis already dedicate some time to better understanding students to achieve the above, but I doubt it is done using these sorts of sophisticated techniques (I’d be happy to hear of, or from anyone who does).
The statistics presented on the benefits obtained by using such techniques is very compelling, just as BI itself usually mounts a strong business case, so too does customer analytics – but only if the organisation truly sees the potential value and can drive the initiative well. An organisation really needs to be customer centric to make this work.
There is obviously a large degree of commonality with the aims of BI, and a strong BI capability is necessary to do this well.
I imagine there’d be several areas within Universities interested in this type of capability (and not just the marketing folks), but I suspect it will be some time before we see anyone doing this well.
Several institutions in the US have used this type of capability to great effect, improving the quality and quantity of their applications, increasing student grades and lowering attrition – and increasing donations form alumni of course.
Michael Gibson
Data Warehouse Manager
Deakin University
