Right service, right time: data warehousing breakthrough 'supersizes' the business value of event detection for insurance providers.

A man arrives at his local pharmacy, part of a large retail chain, to fill his pain prescription for one of the COX-2 specific inhibitors. When the pharmacist enters the prescription into a computer, safety data pops up with a reminder that recent studies have raised concerns about cardiac events associated with this class of drugs. Until now, however, that information might not be enough to generate more than a generic warning.

But because of a powerful advance in event detection technology--the ability to combine events with in-depth historical and customer profile data--the pharmacy now has access to patient-level data that allows the pharmacist to securely view other prescriptions and a patient history that reveals a prior heart attack. It also suggests alternative therapies that might be appropriate. This gives pharmacists a powerful tool in the role of a clinical safety check to better head off medical errors and save patient lives.

This story exemplifies the promise of business intelligence based on event detection. Targeted, event-based intelligence catches customers at an opportune time. Customer retention, new customer acquisition and cross-marketing successes all can significantly improve. Yet until very recently, the ability to combine events with in-depth historical, product and customer profile data was more of a dream than reality. There was no reliable way to combine recognition of the triggered event with the analysis and the deployment of an offer or action in near real-time.

In the past few months, however, data warehousing advances have been unveiled that allow companies to achieve the dream by enabling all of those processes on the same technology platform with a single, up-to-date copy of the data. Leading companies in a variety of industries are already taking advantage of this sophisticated new level of business intelligence, providing them with an unusual competitive advantage.

As companies are learning how to leverage event detection, some have pushed its use into real-time. A few companies are leading an evolution where they are combining a customer's history and the current event to respond in real-time with "supersized" intelligence. The result is that they are able to maximize the profitability of every aspect of their businesses.

Understanding the customer is often the key differentiator among competing businesses. Many companies have tried to enhance the precision and value of their customer interactions by segmenting and doing target marketing to particular customer types. Such campaigns still have value, but intelligent event detection means that technology has even more to offer.

The new Holy Grail is to capture the customer's attention at precisely the time when he or she is most receptive, with exactly the right product. Moreover, such moments--opportunities to demonstrate superior customer service and create new sales opportunities--occur nearly every time a customer walks inside a store.

Today, though, most companies don't have that kind of moment-to-moment business intelligence. There are several reasons for that, including that while most can detect specific business transactions for which they've set parameters, many can't connect them to a particular customer or their history in near real-time.

The ability to achieve next-generation event detection is tied to an important, recent advance in data warehousing provided by a select number of technology providers. From a single platform, enterprise data warehouses now can capture and load transactional data within seconds (often through "trickle feeds" or enterprise application integration message queues).That same platform also can run powerful new analytical applications, which continuously monitor and detect events and then perform in-depth analysis and suggest potential actions by drawing on extraordinarily deep business intelligence at the time the event occurs. This is a significant advance that benefits the company and its customers alike.

Finally, companies can do all this without compromising their traditional, less time-dependent data warehouse workload, such as analyses on years of historical data.

Most companies recognize that as many products become commodities, the real differentiator is the ability to service customers with striking accuracy and timeliness. The power inherent in these advances in event detection is quite simple: it enables companies to deliver the right service and the right product to the right customer at the right time. In doing so, companies can continuously build the type of customer loyalty they need to thrive.

Contributor Tracy Spadola is an insurance industry consultant with Teradata, a division of NCR Corp. She can be reached at [e-mail].