SAS announces global availability of SAS® for Customer Experience Analytics

The online channel is brought into the mainstream of marketing, business and channel management activities.

SAS today announced the global launch of SAS for Customer Experience Analytics. Debuted in the UK in February 2007 this new addition to SAS’ comprehensive Customer Intelligence suite is the result of a global teaming agreement with Speed-Trap, a UK-based provider of software that uses Web 2.0 technology to deliver complete on-line customer insight. The solution captures real-time data from the web channel and integrates it with data from other channels to provide companies with true multi-channel customer intelligence that will help them better understand and communicate to their customers.

“SAS for Customer Experience Analytics has enabled us to know where to focus our attention enabling us to give our customers the best possible service,” said Stephen Lonergan, program manager, HSBC Global Transaction Banking. “It helps us to maximize the performance of our HSBCnet site and prioritize development activity where it is most needed. We have already seen significant benefit from having this tool at our disposal.”

SAS for Customer Experience Analytics was developed using patented Dynamic Collection™ technology from Speed-Trap. This unique high performance data collection system has been built into SAS’ existing Enterprise Intelligence Platform.

Customer experience analytics emphasizes insight on the customer by combining data about their web behavior with data from other touch points such as the call-center or point-of-purchase history. Applying analytics to this combined data can, among other things:

* Identify customers that prefer to research online and purchase offline
* Determine which online campaigns were most successful in acquiring customers that turned out to be loyal and highly profitable
* Identify which products customers are researching online so an appropriate offer can be made.

“This is about understanding individual customers and their interactions rather than web servers or web pages; recording business events and customer experiences rather than web metrics,” said Jeff Levitan, general manager, SAS Customer Intelligence.
Rapid ROI

The offering includes an innovative dynamic data collection mechanism which can capture all interactions on the page with the introduction of a simple line of text to any page needing analysis, enabling implementations to begin yielding results within a matter of days, rapidly increasing speed to deployment and return on marketing investment.

“Companies are increasingly recognizing that only looking at past activity on your website is no longer enough,” added Levitan. “More marketers are applying forward-looking analytics to identify what aspects of the web site influence customer behavior and outcomes, and forecasting of future trends.”
Built-in predictive models, forecasting and goal-seeking routines

SAS for Customer Experience Analyt­ics incorporates pre-built analytics to help marketers project whether or not specific business goals will be met in the future, based on the performance drivers and metrics of a current market­ing campaign.

Malcolm Duckett, VP Marketing at Speed-Trap comments “Marketers want to understand their customers and their behavior across channels in real time, who is actually visiting their websites and each individual’s intent and actions? We see the combination of Speed-Trap’s Dynamic Collection technology and SAS’ unrivalled business intelligence experience in online markets as an ideal match to produce the in-depth customer insight that so many organizations are lacking.”
Designed for a wide range of users

Easy-to-use Web-based reporting enables a wide range of users to view, interact, author and distribute standard and custom reports, allowing decision makers to get the information that they need in the formats they need it to drive more focused business decisions.
An integrated suite of top-ranked marketing solutions

While many enterprise marketing management vendors are narrowly focused on point solutions, SAS provides a comprehensive suite of top-ranked products that span the entire customer-focused marketing process. SAS software’s campaign management capabilities are part of a broader customer intelligence suite of solutions that handles campaign management, cross-sell/up-sell, customer retention, customer segmentation, e-mail marketing, event-driven marketing, campaign optimization, marketing mix analysis, marketing performance management and Web analytics.

Customers worldwide using SAS to support customer initiatives include 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, American Honda Motor Co., DeutschlandCard, The Dow Chemical Co., First Citizens Bank, Grupo Santander, Hartford Life, HSBC Global Transaction Banking, Swisscom, US Bank, Vodafone Australia and Wolters Kluwer.