Xelector: Customer Insight Solution

Xelector is an innovative comparison shopping service. Xelector and Accenture jointly devised a full development program to create a database business capable of supporting multiple financial services and utility products across Europe. The initial Xelector product launch offered mortgages to the UK market. Mortgages, automotive insurance, credit cards and personal loans followed in other European markets. As a result of this venture, Xelector's business partners increased their customers' satisfaction as well as their own revenues and commissions.

To receive more Client Successes, sign up for My Outlook, your single e-mail source for all of Accenture's latest ideas and innovation, personalized specifically to your business interests and the industry issues you face.

Xelector is a startup that effectively defines a new category: a business-to-business-to-consumer online marketplace that allows Europeans to compare, select and buy a wide array of financial services and utility products.

Identifying the best and most profitable customers and determining their demographic, geographic and behavioral details is a major but essential task. In fact, the need is to go further, to use the information to draw Customer Insights and then create relevant, differentiated Customer Offers. Then it becomes possible to build successful, long-term customer relationships.

Recognizing this, a group of experienced financial services specialists created Xelector—an innovative database business and comparison shopping service. Operating "behind" member Internet hubs and portals (and thus invisible to the end consumer), Xelector asks customers a series of fact-finding questions about their purchase requirements. It then uses powerful data analysis tools to generate a ranked list of purchase options specifically tailored to meet customers' needs. In essence, it links customers with multiple product providers (banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, utilities).

Member Internet sites benefit in two ways:

• By increasing the number of visitors and the number of return visits to their sites.
• By earning a commission if the purchase is made via their site, regardless of whose product it is.

In addition, as consumers use the service, Xelector collects all relevant customer data and progressively builds a unique, vast database of consumer behavior and preferences across multiple websites in Europe. The challenge for Xelector lay in moving from concept to fully operational business. To do this, Xelector chose to work with Accenture, which it recognized for its thought leadership and experience in both the Customer Relationship Management and eCommerce areas.

Xelector and Accenture professionals worked together to devise a full development program to create the database business, capable of supporting multiple financial services and utility products across Europe.

Given the vast reservoir of data that Xelector would accumulate over time, a large capacity, scalable data warehousing and data mining system was called for and SAS was chosen to provide the complete end-to-end solution. The joint project team of Accenture, SAS and Xelector worked on conceptual and functional design, the development of the technical solution and rollout, including the eCommerce technical architecture, and broad scale project management.

Xelector also built various sophisticated Customer Insight applications to exploit the value of the data. These applications provide Xelector's product providers and website partners with an unrivaled opportunity to understand market trends and customer behavior, to test products on the Internet and to tailor customer offers appropriately.

To support Xelector's planned pan-European rollout, there was a need to accommodate different local conditions and financial services rules in different countries. Accenture consultants from France, Germany, Spain and Italy provided local input to customize the system to each market and to facilitate introductions to local product providers and website partners that might benefit from the Xelector offering.

Accenture's wide-ranging contributions to, and project management support for Xelector's database business ensured that the database and Customer Insight applications were launched on schedule.

The initial Xelector product launch offered mortgages to the UK market via first-e, the Internet bank. Mortgages, automotive insurance, credit cards and personal loans were launched in the United Kingdom in autumn 2000, and a number of other European countries rolled out during the last quarter of 2000.

Xelector's Web partners are benefiting from increased customer satisfaction (and revenues and commissions). Xelector's database business also received the "Dot-com Computing Award for Technical Innovation" from the SAS Institute.