This post is authored by Matt LaHood, SVP, Science and Analytics Services at Symend. Matt is an analytics expert with 20 years of experience at FICO helping establish the company’s optimization practice and delivery of its analytics technology. Matt grew up supporting and delivering advanced analytic projects around the world in Latin America, Europe and Asia. As VP and Head of Custom Analytics for the Americas, he led the implementation and integration of newly developed analytics technology within FICO’s software.
Keep reading to find out how Symend is expanding its behavioral science, data science and advanced analytics capabilities to help enterprises deliver world-class customer service.
Why should enterprises invest in advanced analytics?
When your company is serving massive volumes of customers, it becomes increasingly difficult to create a personalized customer experience without driving up operating costs. While personalization alone helps increase customer satisfaction, there is no guarantee that it will drive desired outcomes for your business.
Communication that doesn’t align with what the customer needs, or what they expect, quickly leads to disengagement and dissatisfaction. By applying behavioral and data science with advanced analytics, Symend generates key insights that show you how to best engage with your customers. These insights are used to personalize communications that leave customers feeling understood. These insights are strengthened as customers interact with our communications, identifying and validating patterns in behavior over time.
Symend helps enterprises gain a deeper understanding of their customers to infuse behavioral science into data-driven strategies that engage their customers with empathy. These insights allow Symend’s clients to remain agile so they can rapidly respond to the evolving needs and changing sentiment of their customers, creating a personalized experience with continuously optimized results.
Why is advanced analytics essential to engaging customers with past due bills?
Customers who have fallen behind on their bills often experience high amounts of uncertainty and shame. Symend uses behavioral science with advanced analytics to validate and optimize the best approach to engaging past due customers. With an understanding of the science behind customer behavior, Symend helps its clients create positive experiences for their customers when they need it most. Symend’s behavioral science and data-driven strategies are proven to empower customers to act. This is done through personalized communication, self-serve tools and flexible repayment options. The key is to ensure that all communications leave customers feeling empowered, rather than disengaged.
What teams make up Science and Analytics Services team at Symend?
Science and Analytics Services unites behavioral science, data science and data analytics as part of the greater Product team at Symend, which is led by our Chief Product Officer, PehKeong Teh, formerly SVP, Marketing Cloud at Salesforce. There are over 35 people on the team with extensive and varying areas of expertise, including PhDs and Master’s degrees in neuroscience, psychology, mathematical statistics, data science, computer science and information technologies.
What unique value does Symend bring to its clients?
Behavioral science is Symend’s true differentiator – but it is powerful because it is highly integrated with data science and advanced analytics. The trifecta of behavioral science, data science and data analytics continuously optimizes communications. This empathetically nudges customers towards a desired action based on the way the customer engages with the communications they receive.
Symend’s rapid experimentation, web testing and field testing create a strong foundation of insights on what drives customers to act. Communications are tested with millions of customers at any given time, speeding up the rate at which Symend can create, execute, measure and iterate on personalized engagement strategies.
Learn more about Matt LaHood’s 20 year tenure at FICO and what brought him to Symend
Why is Symend a timely solution in the market?
Most companies are starting their journey or are aware of the need to advance their analytics and decisioning capabilities. Companies with strong decisioning capabilities are able to rapidly extract insights from their data to continuously build, execute and iterate on data-driven strategies. This allows them to drive world-class engagement through better customer interactions and improved service offerings. Symend accomplishes all of this, and more, by applying behavioral science in a way that has never been done before. Symend infuses insights into every engagement with the customer to drive more effective, efficient actions at every stage of the customer lifecycle. This allows Symend to not only drive desired actions, but to positively shape the way that consumers interact with their service providers.
How does Symend bring outsize value to its clients?
Symend currently serves the majority of top-tier telecommunications providers in North America and is successfully serving a multinational bank. By interacting with millions of customers, Symend has developed foundational insights on how to best engage customers who are behind on their bills. This helps clients rapidly accelerate the speed at which they develop specific insights about their customers.
Using a combination of extensive customer and research data, our behavioral scientists extract and synthesize insights to inform strategies which are continuously iterated on to amplify desired outcomes for the client.
Symend’s extensive and growing library of behavioral-based insights remains unmatched by what any individual service provider can discover on its own. These insights will only grow deeper as Symend expands across new industries and regions.
Why is Symend well positioned to offer its solution across the entire customer lifecycle?
By working with a client in one area of their business, we develop in-depth insights specific to that decision area. This creates the foundation of specific insights about their customers including how they like to engage and what they respond best to. These insights can then be applied to other decision areas, like customer acquisition and retention, to deliver exceptional results well beyond the potential of any existing solutions in the market.
How do you plan to grow the team?
As we continue to expand our behavioral science and advanced analytics capabilities, we will continue to look to expand our in-house expertise across a variety of fields including data science, behavioral science and data analytics.
