The next generation of customer relationship management (CRM) technology enhances multi-channel interactions for real-time management of customer dialogues.
"Enabling more effective multi-channel dialogues will benefit companies that have invested significant resources automating front-office systems but still lack the real-time intelligence needed to personalise individual customer experiences," says Andr'e Zitzke, solutions architect at SAS, the leader in business intelligence.
The company has announced plans for SAS Interaction Management, a new solution designed to complement the company's CRM offerings. The solution will apply real-time analysis to all inbound and outbound customer interactions.
"Real-time analytics has become a popular industry catch phrase, but to date the hype has exceeded the promise," says Zitzke. "SAS has conducted an in-depth assessment of this market space and found that available solutions fall short of the mark - they either lack the analytic wherewithal needed to provide meaningful value, commit buyers to a single vendor architecture, or are campaign and product-centric rather than customer-centric."
Zitzke says SAS stands alone in its ability to employ the most current information available to analyse and enrich customer relationships. "Our broad array of assessment techniques will ensure personalisation and the best response in every customer communication.
"SAS Interaction Management will even enable companies to track, predict and act on customer behaviour derived not only from customer data, but also from environmental information such as stock market feeds, network downtime or even trends detected by SAS Text Miner," says Zitzke.
By combining the insights culled from multiple assessment techniques, SAS Interaction Management will proffer the insight needed to intervene much earlier in the customer lifecycle. By projecting, months earlier than previously possible, 'likely to buy' customers as well as customers who are prone to leave, companies can dramatically improve the value of customer relationships.
For over 26 years, SAS products have supported virtually every available operating system and database. The SAS Interaction Management solution will extend this heritage to the CRM application space. Today, some front-office application vendors include rules or pre-packaged 'black-box' analytics to add intelligence to the interactions within their specific product suites. However, they cannot readily reach beyond their own systems to create and enhance intelligence without the assistance of a third-party integrator. SAS will supply the capability to consistently deliver intelligence across all channels to all pre-packaged and even 'home grown' front-office systems to enable companies to provide a consistent face to their customers and manage their customer interactions.
Current products that claim interaction management capabilities are systems designed to return product recommendations based on historical purchase behaviour of similar buyers. SAS Interaction Management will judiciously select the best possible recommendation from a sophisticated set of assessment techniques. This multi-analysis approach takes into account the context of the current customer discussion and ensures the response is relevant to every situation instead of blindly delivered script.
"There is increasing demand in the marketplace for broader access to customer intelligence, not just in marketing, but also sales and service functions," says Bill Chambers, Principal Analyst at Doculabs, Inc, an independent US research and consulting firm.
"While traditional marketing practices are campaign-centric and focused on the delivery of outbound marketing campaigns, the next generation of CRM activity involves applying real-time intelligence to all customer interactions, both inbound and outbound. Based on its core strengths of analytics and data mining, SAS is well-positioned to deliver extremely effective and targeted intelligence consistently across all channels."
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