The first question you need to ask.

“How can we help the customer?” When you’re looking through your data for an advantage, it always comes back to this question. This theme came up again in my conversation with Jose Murillo, Connecting with customers through data.

Jose is Chief Analytics Officer at Mexico's largest financial group, Grupo Financiero Banorte. He established the Analytics Business Unit. His data-driven approach has yielded over $1 billion in extra value to the bank -- and counting.

I wanted to highlight one example from the bank’s approach, here. It shows the value of understanding your customer.

Grupo Financiero Banorte had a challenge: get more debit card holders to sign up for a credit card. But to issue a credit card, you have to check customers’ credit rating and assess their credit score. That’s where it fell apart, when the bank could get customers on the phone. People don’t want to give you the information to do the credit check.

The bank had a large pile of coupons for a fast food restaurant that were soon going to expire. They mailed the coupons to all the people who had debit cards and they wanted to advance to credit cards. They asked nothing in return. Then, the bank started contacting them -- and they had 3X better conversion for this campaign than any previous campaign.

The reason? The customer had gotten value -- and wanted to give something back. Reciprocity is part of human nature.

The bank drilled down into their data -- and saw that this feeling of reciprocity (and their results) were strongest two days after the coupon went out (Just long enough, so that the customer remembered getting the coupon). Understanding what works, how and when -- these are the patterns that your data can show if you pay attention. But first, you have to experiment.