Companies are increasingly looking to tie traditional CRM systems to analytical tools to retain and boost the value of customers, according to users at SAS Institute's BetterManagement Live Worldwide Business Conference 2005 last week.
Aegon Direct Marketing Services, the direct marketing arm of Aegon USA, last week began a year-long rollout of SAS CRM and analytical tools that will replace four legacy CRM systems that run marketing campaigns at four locations.
Aegon, which sells life and supplemental health insurance, sought to centralize data in one repository to get a single view of the customer, said Karen Klein, senior vice president of marketing services at the company.
"Now we will have some indication of the percentage of [marketing campaign] overlap," Klein said. "This will give us more intelligence to who we are offering [product] to, how many times we are offering to them and across which business units."
Aegon plans to install SAS's Customer Intelligence CRM software suite and combine it with already installed SAS analytical tools to create a marketing and business intelligence platform, she said.
According to Klein, a key piece of the CRM suite -- the Interaction Management business activity monitoring tool -- can detect trends in transactional data and include triggers to start a campaign if data shows a customer might leave the company.
The US Bank is consolidating its marketing analytics, CRM and business intelligence analysis and reporting tools into a single 16TB to 20TB data mart as it moves from a mainframe to a distributed environment, said Richard Martino, senior vice president of marketing information and research.
The company has completed the first phases of the project, adding consumer data to the consolidated data mart, Martino said. The final phase, rolling in data for the bank's commercial business, will be completed early next summer, he said.
US Bank is consolidating using SAS Marketing Automation tools; SAS Enterprise Guide, a client application that provides access to analytics; SAS Enterprise Miner data mining tools; and Information Builders business intelligence analysis tools.
The consolidated data mart should put a halt to the problem of different analysts getting different answers to the same question, he said.
Scott Radcliffe, director of customer life-cycle decisions at Sprint Nextel, said his company is linking the Customer Intelligence CRM tools and SAS analytics tools to help reduce customer churn and boost revenue.
He said combining the systems improves ties between various lines of business, helping each understand the others' goals.
If ties among lines of business are created, users can create meaningful movement in the performance metric of a particular group of customers, he said.