Meet the Team - Jason Gilligan, Digital Marketing and Customer Insight Analyst

In this edition we catch up with Jason Gilligan, our digital marketing and customer insight analyst.

Jason joined the team at First4Lawyers in April last year from retailer JD Sports, where he was a multi-channel analyst. So, what prompted the move? Jason explains: “I’d beenworking in retail for a number of years and was ready for a fresh challenge in a new sector.”

With 12 years’ industry experience under his belt, Jason knew the type of challenge he was after. After graduating from Huddersfield University with a first-class degree in Mathematical Sciences, he took a job a Yorkshire Building Society, where he was responsible for evaluating and measuring customer segmentations, in order to support the financial and strategic plans.

Since then, Jason has held a number of roles, all focused on customer analysis and profiling for large organisations. The move to First4Lawyers allowed him to put those skills to use in a different environment, he says. “It was unusual to find a smaller business with a vacancy for this type of work, as it’s normally outsourced to agencies, but the fact they are investing in this type of customer analysis appealed.”

So, how does a digital marketing and customer insight analyst spend his day? “My role is essentially to take all the data from various marketing activity – such as our TV advertising, online adverts, etc – and distil it into useful information that we can use to help understand our customers, and therefore drive business.

“For example, I’ll look at a particular ad campaign on say, PPC, and look at the engagement levels. What did people do after viewing it? Did they come through to our website? Did they start a claim? Did they go elsewhere? Only by having someone who can analyse this data and customer behaviour can we know which of our approaches work, which we should be focusing on, and which don’t and should be dropped.”

As the world has moved online, customer insight analysis has had to become real-time to ensure that customer journeys are captured and adapted to reflect changing needs. “Even as recently as a few years ago, customer insight reports would be generated monthly for clients, but the problem there is that businesses were acting on month-old information. By the time changes had been implemented, a few months would have passed and the original data those decisions had been based on was out of date. Today we have the tools to allow us to monitor in real-time what is happening, and adjust accordingly.” This analysis is where Jason’s expertise lies.

Jason uses technology to give full end-to-end tracking linking calls and initial enquiries to actual claims converted.

“I can log into the system and see in real-time how long calls are taking, if the claims are put through and if they are accepted or rejected. I’ve been working on creating new dashboards since the start of the year, and the first few weeks’ worth of data is now available. These dashboards will be accessible in the next few weeks to everyone, so the claims team, marketing, finance, everyone will be able to see up-to-the-minute information on each claim.”

When he’s not at work, Jason and his wife spend most of their time entertaining their two children who are two years and four months old respectively. Jason is also fully trained in the martial art of Jiu Jitsu, where he holds a black belt in the traditional form, as well as having training in the Brazilian form.