Chugin Financial Group Implements uSonar to Achieve Advanced Data Utilization

In its medium-term management plan, Chugin Financial Group has established a policy for its corporate division to "pursue timely approaches tailored to the customer's stage and management challenges." To achieve this, the group aims to advance data utilization and establish a system for identifying latent needs through non-face-to-face channels. As part of this initiative, they are promoting corporate email marketing. In striving for "One-to-One Marketing" to deliver precise information to each customer, the group faced a challenge: the corporate email addresses they possessed lacked detailed information such as department or job title, making it impossible to analyze needs based on roles or areas of responsibility and preventing the delivery of optimized marketing emails. To resolve this, they focused on the business card information exchanged by sales representatives. After evaluating business card management tools to utilize this data for sales across the entire group, they adopted the corporate information and business card management application "mSonar" for 5,000 IDs. Furthermore, they introduced "PLANSonar" to enable the delivery of personalized emails for "One-to-One Marketing" and to facilitate sales activities based on the latent needs of corporate clients.

After comparing our options with other services, we decided to implement uSonar based on the following factors.

1. High Comprehensiveness of LBC and Efficiency in Data Centralization

The corporate database LBC*, provided by uSonar, covers 12.5 million entities nationwide, ranging from large corporations to sole proprietorships. Since mSonar is a tool equipped with this LBC database, we determined that it would enable more multifaceted sales activities by leveraging corporate data, rather than simply digitizing business cards. Furthermore, we valued the fact that LBC serves as a common key for centralizing data scattered across multiple systems, enabling efficient data matching. We expect this to be highly effective for data integration across the various companies within Chugin Financial Group, Inc.

2. Sales Activities That Capture Customer Potential Needs and Timing

Chugin Financial Group, Inc. also implemented PLANSonar to realize sales activities based on customer potential needs that were previously difficult to grasp. By creating lists from business card information consolidated in mSonar, we can use PLANSonar to assign attributes including basic information such as industry and company size, as well as qualitative information such as customer interests, including 'companies interested in DX' or 'companies proactive in decarbonization management.' This allows us to deliver personalized emails to each customer. Additionally, we valued the ability of PLANSonar to utilize intent data, which helps capture potential customer needs and timing, thereby enabling the creation of highly accurate targeting lists.

3. Proven Implementation Results During the Trial

During the trial period prior to the full implementation of uSonar, we combined registered business card data with the interest information from the uSonar corporate database to create lists for email distribution. The results showed higher email open and content click-through rates compared to our previous campaigns. This confirmed that utilizing uSonar services would bring us closer to achieving One-to-One marketing. Furthermore, we conducted an mSonar trial at branches of The Chugoku Bank, Ltd. Many corporate sales representatives reported that the information provided by mSonar was invaluable for gathering intelligence on new business prospects, confirming that the uSonar corporate database is highly effective in the field.

Future Outlook

Moving forward, we will advance the sophistication of our intent data utilization, such as incorporating interest information inferred from the web behavior of our business partners. This is expected to improve the precision of our customer approach by enabling us to provide the right information to the right customers at the right time. Additionally, the medium-term management plan of Chugin Financial Group, Inc. aims to strengthen our group sales structure. By leveraging LBC to centralize customer data across all group companies, we will promote more comprehensive and efficient sales activities. Furthermore, we anticipate building a more robust data utilization infrastructure by integrating the Salesforce environment with uSonar.

The Chugin Group aims to provide comprehensive financial services as a 'co-creation partner' for our regional customers. We believe that advancing the sophistication of our data utilization is essential to realizing service delivery that addresses the specific management challenges of each customer. By leveraging the corporate database of uSonar, we expect to identify customer needs that were previously overlooked and improve the precision of our approach in future sales activities. Furthermore, we look forward to utilizing LBC in the future to centrally manage customer information across the entire group, thereby establishing a system that allows us to respond to customer needs as a unified group.

Chugin Financial Group, Inc. is the holding company of The Chugoku Bank, Ltd., which is headquartered in Okayama Prefecture. Since its establishment in 1930, The Chugoku Bank has developed alongside the local community. In 2022, the Chugin Financial Group was established. The Chugin Group aims to transform into a corporate group that practices problem-solving tailored to each individual customer, with the goal of building a sustainable business model that develops mutually with the local community and our customers.
Site URL: https://www.chugin-fg.co.jp

* 'LBC' is a corporate data service provided by uSonar that assigns an 11-digit management code to business establishments across Japan. It centrally manages a wealth of corporate attribute information, such as industry, annual sales, profit, number of employees, and fixed IP addresses. By matching client data with 'LBC', it enables precise targeting excluding existing business partners.
https://usonar.co.jp/service/usonar/index.php#serviceLbc

Contact for this inquiry: Public Relations Department, uSonar Co., Ltd. (Hiyama/Sawada)
Email: pr@usonar.co.jp