‘When you find someone passionate about data, keep hold of them’

Marketing Week (MW): When you start a new job with a blank sheet of paper, what do you do first?

Simon Kaffel (SK): It is a big shift from where I was previously at Sky. Zurich is an interesting organisation. It is very established and it has a huge history. [Yet] it is almost quite young in its approach to the use of data from a marketing perspective.

One of the things that really appealed to me with this role was that they said: ‘Here you go Simon, here is a blank sheet of paper, make the most of what we’ve got.’ So that was a really interesting challenge for me.

I spent 11 years at Sky and the thought of taking a new job was quite daunting. I was quite fortunate that I have also done some consulting, so I am able to do a lot of fact finding and learn very quickly about organisations. Zurich and insurance is a new language and a whole new approach to operating in business for me, so that was interesting. I am still learning – there are a load of acronyms, a load of terms I’d never heard before, for example.

At Sky I was focused on the UK and Republic of Ireland and now I’ve got a lot of internal clients around the globe with very different internal cultures.

The focus at Zurich has not previously been on using data to improve our knowledge of you as a customer. That is the new focus and this is where my job comes in – it is a new role.

MW: How are you creating a data strategy for the business?

SK: Zurich has data assets around the globe and has had no consistent approach. It had been very much focused around delivering products for its customers, that sold themselves to a degree.

A data asset could be a file of customers, or a file of prospects that have been purchased. It could be a database that is very robust, that provides the operating platform for the entire business, or it could be a data mart [part of a data store] that enables us to do a specific function.

There is now a shift [towards looking at] who our customers are and how we can tailor our offer to them, and towards driving the understanding of our customers’ behaviour and attitudes. This is where I come in. Looking at a full range of capabilities – from what data

we are capturing and making sure it is the right data to drive the value we need, through to ensuring we are storing it in the right way and looking at how it is used in the end.

There is a certain amount of selling that needs to happen. People are aware of these assets but they are not necessarily aware of the value behind them, so before we can get a huge capital expenditure on a database, or a customer relationship management system, let’s prove that there is value in doing certain things. In some countries, we are not doing anything, so let’s start to prove the commercial value of the data we have and then we can start to push for more expenditure.

MW: How do you work with the data the company has globally?

SK: Definitions are a real challenge with the global role and so is not speaking the same language. A term such as ‘customer’ might seem like an easy thing to articulate but actually it isn’t.

So how can we manage that across the globe?

I don’t know the full answer to that yet. A customer could be somebody who has taken out a policy for their children or on behalf of their parents: so who actually is the customer? Is it the person you are speaking to or the end beneficiary of the policy? Ultimately, we will deal with both but the end decision has to be made at a board level as something that would potentially get reported to the City. We have to make sure that everybody across the board is bought in – from finance to legal to the directors in Zurich.

The real challenge is understanding what we have got around the globe, whether legally we can use the data within each country and whether we have articulated at the point of capturing data how and why we are going to use it.

In Argentina, I was keen to enrich the data we held to do an analysis project and was told there was some data readily available, which would allow us to identify the cars people drive, the ages of the children in the family, the method they use to pay for their financial services. [So I said] OK let’s just make sure that we can use this data. We did nothing with that data before getting the legal guys to look at that situation.

It is a steep learning curve for me – I know the eight principles of the UK’s Data Protection Act like the back of my hand, but there are quite a fewmore out there [globally].

MW: How are you working with marketers in the business?

SK: It is fantastic that we now have this marketing focus on data. I have a chief executive who is now talking to chief marketing officers about data quality and management. We’ve got people who would normally talk about brands and advertising talking about databases and campaign management software. There is very much a shift towards customer-centric data management.

I am focusing on enabling commercial people to make decisions based on data that they have managed themselves. Rather than having some complex analysis that requires deep coding, I want to give the marketing people the tools to make decisions with simple software from which they can run reports, analysis and build models.

So far it has been very well accepted, my boss [CMO Nick Wright] has been demonstrating the tool to all of the global CMOs. He showed it to people in Dubai and everyone said: “I didn’t realise you could do that.” It is as if a light has been shone on data and people realise what you can do with it.

MW: Can you give some examples of what you have changed in the past year?

SK: We are performing particularly well in Latin America. The guys in Buenos Aires are really keen to use the data assets. Zurich’s IT team in Argentina has built a single customer view and they are saying, ‘we have done this, now what do we do with it?’.

I am working closely with Celerity, a company that I’ve worked with in the past, to run some analysis on this single customer view, the results of which are going to be circulated around the business. It is a big shift. We are running a pilot on some marketing automation software that is enabling the guys in Argentina to use the data in new ways.

MW: Not many people would say they always knew they wanted to work in data. How did you get into it?

SK: Each of my degrees touched on data. After studying, I worked at NatWest, where we had a software tool and my manager decided to send me on a course to learn about it, so that I could add some value to what she was doing.

My role then was very much focused on telephone and PC banking. I went on this course and we were given an exercise to do in 15 minutes, but while the course tutor was talking, I did the exercise. When I was back at base, I was moved to a database marketing role.

Then I became a database marketing manager at Sky, starting off when it was migrating its platform from analogue to digital. That was a challenge, as we had a number of customers we had to continually communicate with to explain that their TV signal was going to go off. We ended up with around 3.5 million customers that were all migrating across with very few dropping off. We then started to investigate the use of data to personalise communication, using socio-demographic data to tailor it.

We had to hit 10 million customers by 2010, which was very challenging, but we did it with a few months to spare.

We also launched broadband without very much time to prepare the data and the platforms. But we had support from a strong agency.

MW: What advice do you have for those who want to advance their careers in data?

SK: The great thing is that there is more focus on data so I am hoping that there is going to be more fresh blood coming into the industry. But when I was at graduate school learning all about databases and coding, I turned around to my lecturer and said: ‘Why are you telling me this? I am never going to need to learn about databases’.

If you were to ask the majority of data professionals with at least 10 years’ experience whether they started out thinking ‘when I grow up I’m going to do data’, none of them will say that this is what they wanted to do.

The data world is very small, so networking is fundamental. It is incredible how quickly you can build up a good relationship with people and a good reputation with regards to the use of data.

Quite often people get into data because they like to code. They like to sit behind their desks. They like to tell you that the number is seven. That is all very well, but what does seven mean?

The real challenge for data people, who tend to be introverted, is to put themselves out in front of a large audience. [They need to] think about what the end client really wants.