Otto UK, part of the world's largest mail order group, is using KXEN's next generation data mining automation to optimise its marketing to 1.5 million customers. Already KXEN's solution has cut what was a three-day process down to less than an hour, has enabled better targeting of customer communications and is driving better decision making.

"Using KXEN means we're promoting the right things to the right people at the right time," says Otto UK's head of customer management Andy Bryan. "It has allowed us to target our communications better and get a more positive return on investment. In short we're making better decisions."

With sales last year of more than £460 million, Otto UK is a force to be reckoned with in the home shopping market in Britain. As well as the respected Grattan and Freemans brands it also includes Kaleidoscope, Look Again, Oli and Montage.

It was a need to be able to respond more quickly to change that led Otto UK's marketing optimisation team to implement KXEN's next generation solution. "The existing tools and process that were in place were not able to keep pace with the developments being made in our approach to planning," explains Andy Bryan.

A rigourous evaluation pitched KXEN against two competing solutions. "We looked at a number of different areas, a whole list of criteria," adds Bryan. "KXEN didn't just greatly re-duce our modelling times it scored best in all the other categories too. It was the clear win-ner."

The choice of KXEN has been more than proven in practice too as Bryan explains. "Where in the past we'd just have used analytics to target campaigns and mailings now we can do more return on investment analysis. It's no longer just about targeting. It's about making more strategic decisions, where we can best spend our money, where it costs more to retain a customer than recruit a new one. We're really starting to optimise things," he says.

Otto UK joins hundreds of companies around the world - among them Barclays, Powergen Vodafone and Virgin - that have deployed KXEN's data mining automation and seen dramatic improvements in their marketing as a result, reporting up to 300% increases in campaign response rates.