The customer

IPT are pioneers of online permission based marketing. With over 8.1 million unique opt-in email addresses, over 6.8 million household postal addresses, 1.1 million validated SMS numbers and 900 demographic / lifestyle selections, IPT is UK’s largest direct marketing data provider.

IPT provides a one-stop shop for online direct marketing needs. Market-leading database building and list rental are the centre piece of the business.

The challenge

One of IPT’s core products is sophisticated mystery shopping in the financial services industry. It is in incredibly difficult to represent business competiveness in the market, particularly when the business concerned is major global insurance company.

An even harder task is to harvest relevant data, analyse it and process it. This involves complex mathematical analysis on huge data sets to produce a short executive summary of the business, and its competitors, performance on week-by-week basis.

IPT chose Helastel to implement their mystery shopping platform called Dexter to enable over 200 data collection agents to collect data centrally and over 20 data analysts to run data analysis and generate reports online.

Our expertise

Helastel collaborated with IPT’s mystery shopping company (Direct Excellence) to plan and develop the entire system. We consulted and managed business wide, global roll-out, including employee support and initial training. A UK team of people was on hand to ensure the success of the project – and the security of IPT’s investment.

Helastel provided full solution, including the hardware and the data centre facilities to deal with the large volumes of data, its processing and analysis.

Our experts know all the essential success factors for delivering large scale, distributed data analysis platform. This is why the emphasis was on quality during project planning and execution – and on a high level of user acceptance.

Our solution

Design and development

The task was highly complex due to the volumes of data and the nature of the required analysis of the data. In one day of data collection the database would gain up to 9 million of new records, resulting in monthly volume of 0.3Tb of text data needed for analysis and report generation online.

Implementation

Helastel carefully prepared the requirements, specification and the development plan. The software tailoring for specific needs to IPT began. Dexter version 1 was initially rolled out in the UK according to a carefully designed site-by-site roll out plan. Helastel tested the software in a pre-implementation procedure before every roll-out.

Training

At the same time as the rollout, IT managers, power users (functional admins) and users received intensive training at every site. During the entire roll-out phase, Helastel provided support for Dexter users and administrators designed especially for the project.

Technical Background

Helastel used combination of data transformation techniques on clusters of MySQL database servers. The reporting was performed using a data transformation server in the background and published in various formats, such as online reports of PDF.