The Power of Effective Marketing Automation You Didn’t Know About

It’s no doubt that we live in a time when technology changed the world and our lives particularly. In a good way. It’s crucial for the businesses to adapt to the changes and improve the existing processes to stay successful and profitable.

At ITCL we think that human approach with the right tools can make the businesses succeed, one of those tools is marketing automation. Cloud based software designed to streamline the marketing efforts on targeting prospects and existing customers. There are so many great use cases for marketing automation available that would be hard to describe in one single article. However, I will try to briefly cover a few topics that might spark your interest in this technology.

To start, one of the most important goals for client-faced businesses is to optimize human resources engagement on repetitive tasks but still have contact with a customer. Let’s imagine that someone is organizing a big conference with multiple well-known speakers that bring quite a big audience. Managing the process of registration and supplying relevant information might not be an easy task. Marketing automation professional services can help to collect, organize and spread the information among the audience of attendees. The whole process, easily. In addition to that, keeping engagement and customer satisfaction at a high level is another task that can be accomplished with providing relevant personalized information to the selected audience. Only useful, easily readable, only relevant information from the business to the customer with minimum efforts from the customer’s side. That would be a well-designed email easily readable across mobile and desktop devices, with information about speaker’s sessions that the customer subscribed to, organized in the right way based on start/end session time, and quick intro per each session. The list of enhancements is limited to imagination only, for example, add the functionality to add to the calendar, create a path plan on the exhibition floor to navigate the customer how to get from one session to another; when is the lunch break and what are the options and food/drink location on the map; provide the recommendations on the other speakers sessions based on customer’s persona/profile; etc. It’s also possible to include relevant advertising in these communications to further benefit the business and customers needs.

The successful setup and execution of this campaign will minimize the organizer time and effort in managing inquiries and responses from/to the clients. And let’s imagine the impact on the subsequent setup of such exhibitions down the road, when everything is pretty much defined and just small details would require adjustments and revisions.

Digital Transformation Project for an Insurance Company

Over the years IT Creative Labs has implemented many different projects of various complexity and across many different niches. Our development team comprises senior professionals only and today we asked our lead backend engineer Vlad to share some insights on his work using one of the projects as an example.

The insurance company wanted to semi-automate the process of reviewing insurance claims, track statistics and semi-automate the process of filling out the forms, should the claim be approved for coverage. In order to achieve that the insurance company needed to automate the processing of user documents and to be able to obtain structured user data as a result of that processing. This automated process also needed to be integrated with the existing systems that the insurance company was using already. The first thing we did with the client is break down their requirements into smaller tasks, identifying key objectives.

Useful side note from Vlad: Any task, even the most difficult one, can be broken down into smaller sub-tasks. This concept is called Microproductivity.

Here is the breakdown Vlad & the team proposed:

Task 1

Problem: Documents were rotated differently, some were flipped upside down

Solution: Created an automated process of proper rotation for all the documents. A simple CV (Computer Vision) algorithm was used for that.

Task 2

Problem: Sometimes a scan of a document can be the size of A4 and the document itself is the size of an ID card.

Solution: Implemented a fixed-scale document template by cropping along the edge of the document and removing white space.

Task 3

Problem: Ability to identify the type of documents to be able to extract relevant fields from them.

Solution: A classifier model was implemented based on ML (machine learning), where the convolution neural network was trained on a high volume of documents and error validation (backpropagation).

Task 4

Problem: Different types of documents, a lot of older document types, hand-written documentation.

Solution: Implemented text recognition from image. A classic recognition model for Latin language was implemented.

Task 5

Problem: Extract recognized information and structure it properly mapping it to the correct fields, so it is presented in the cohesive and standardized manner.

Solution: Create an automated machine learning model, trained on specific types of documents,  to extract information from the document and fill in the fields. When the fields were empty, we used an additional filling algorithm for placing all the appropriately identified elements on the coordinate grid.

In Vlad’s own words: “Everything was simple: just several models, algorithms, training and the task was done.”

For this project the following techstack was used: OpenCV, Python, Tensor Flow, Keras. React for frontend and Flask for backend, PostgreSQL for data storage.

As a result of creating this semi-automated machine learning-based process and integrating it with the rest of the existing systems, the insurance company was able to significantly cut down processing time and human error while being able to process larger volumes without increasing its staff count.

If you have a project in mind that you’d like to chat about – reach out!

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