Inductis deploys its in-house methodology, MicroAnalytix, to discern the meaning of endless streams of data and to optimize customer targeting and acquisition, identifying cross-selling opportunities and managing risk. Typical engagements include strategic planning (e.g., assessing both internal and external causes of slowing growth at a credit-card issuer); risk management (e.g., designing fraud detection and prevention systems for a commercial lender); attrition prevention (e.g., segmenting an insured customer base for a health insurer); and offshore optimization (e.g., optimizing the ratio of offshore and onshore technology-development consultants).
Inductis also has a separate analytics service that provides lead management and prospect data maintenance, support for ongoing analytics tasks such as customer-acquisition campaigns, “swing” capacity for risk and marketing-analytics teams, and collections file processing.
Working Through Market-research Firms
Another model for delivering analytics services is to work with market-research firms that work directly with clients. In this model, the market-research firm becomes the client of the offshore service provider, offloading some of the more data-intensive functions to the service provider. These service providers don’t design the research itself; their job is to provide support services to the market-research firm.
“We’re doing what the operations department of a market research firm used to do,” says Rahul Sahgal, President and CEO, Annik Technology Services. “Even the largest operations, such as that of U.S.-based NPD Research — an Annik customer — are being outsourced,” he says.
Annik focuses on providing research and data-related services. These include data normalization and cleansing, conducting market research and customer-satisfaction studies, formatting unstructured data into structured data, and data delivery, including charting and report-generation software.
The company, which has 20 customers in the U.S.A. and Europe, is skilled in the use of SPSS and other statistical methodologies. The firm develops reporting systems that can create presentation-ready reports, including tables, graphs, and narrative analysis. The value added is the boost in productivity and reduction in human error for the preparation of complex reports comprising large number of pages with information derived from multiple data sources.
