Briefs

Intelligent Enterprise, March 1, 2005, By David Stodder

In less than one year, this fabled wagering powerhouse developed advanced CRM and predictive analytics for deeper customer insight

Field Report: Churchill Downs, Louisville, Ky

"This is a triple crown race," says Atique Shah, vice president of CRM and technology solutions at Churchill Downs. Shah is the jockey, so to speak, of a significant implementation of predictive analytics and advanced CRM. The setting for such cutting-edge customer intelligence is fairly surprising; Churchill Downs is most famous for the Kentucky Derby, since 1875 the great annual festival of thoroughbred horse racing held in Louisville, Ky.

Shah arrived in Louisville in December 2003 after an award-winning stint at GSI Commerce, where he led a multichannel CRM initiative that included database marketing and data mining. His mission was to employ CRM analytics to extend the influence of Churchill Downs' core values of strong customer service and develop one-to-one relationships that would be integral to its brand across all channels and properties.

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Continuously adding data sources would prove important because Shah's real target was a platform for predictive analytics � "the foundation of everything we believe in." Employing SPSS's Clementine 9.0 data mining workbench, Churchill Downs built models that can, with increasing accuracy, predict the future potential of a customer based on one day's worth of transactions. Then came the confrontation with tradition. Churchill Downs has a longstanding loyalty rewards program backed by a database of some 200 million transactions by hundreds of thousands of customers. The company had long ago decided on four customer tiers, but Shah felt it was time for the data to tell how many tiers, or segments, really made sense. "Without imposing anything on the data, Clementine said there were nine segments.

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