SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced SAS Web Analytics, the industry's most comprehensive solution for promoting the success of the Web channel.
The solution applies the full power of SAS Customer Intelligence software to online channels so that every customer interaction is powered by a complete view of the customer. Companies using SAS Web Analytics can identify their customers, understand their preferences and deliver on those preferences to enhance customer satisfaction, increase customer retention and improve the bottom line.
Successful Web sites are a marriage of good IT, design and business skills. Each of these groups looks at the Web slightly differently given the group's role in the organisation. IT professionals need to understand how Web infrastructure resources are used for capacity evaluation and server load balancing to increase the quality of service provided. Business people need to tie the Web channel to their sales and service targets and strategies to increase revenue through customer acquisition and customer life time value.
SAS Web Analytics puts the business and IT users in the driver's seat by providing Web data management combined with data from customer-facing systems and advanced Web analytics. A role-specific reporting system delivers knowledge to the various stakeholders in the process.
"SAS Web Analytics offers all of the key strengths of SAS software with which we are very familiar, such as expandability, scalability and ease of integration," said Martin Robl, project leader of the Portal Analytics Solution (PAS) at Austria-based OMV, the leading oil and gas group in Central and Eastern Europe. "With SAS Web Analytics, we are now able to verify the success of online banner advertising and other similar activity, and independently determine whether we are getting value for our money."
"Powered by SAS Web Analytics, PAS has already saved us a lot of time and resources, showing us where we can invest our creative efforts in the portal to maximum effect," added Robl. "More importantly, it will help us serve customers better by improving the usability and quality of our Web pages."
SAS Web Analytics is fully integrated with SAS 9 analytics and can work in unison with SAS Customer Intelligence solutions, such as SAS Marketing Automation 4. SAS Web Analytics uses data mining capabilities to recognise patterns that drive customer success online. Information from the online channel is incorporated into a full customer data warehouse across all channels for a quick understanding of how to improve customer conversion and service.
"Web customers demand better service and ease-of-use. With SAS Web Analytics and its ability to merge large volumes of Web data with other customer-facing systems and apply visualisation tools and sophisticated analytics, Web marketers can meet and exceed their customers' demands. Using the analytic capabilities of SAS, companies can greatly improve their customer relationship efforts and increase customer retention, resulting in increased revenue and lower total cost," said Richard Roach, senior director of worldwide marketing at SAS.
Proactive marketing
SAS Web Analytics enables companies to be proactive in reaching out to online customers. With it, companies can quickly and precisely segment customers and then apply rules-based engines to link specific offers with chosen segments. This can lead to immediate increases in customer satisfaction and Web revenues. Over the long-term, customer retention rates and lifetime customer value also rise.
The SAS solution gives decision-makers the knowledge necessary to rapidly improve the effectiveness of Internet channels and implement better customer relationship strategies. In addition, companies can determine whether they're meeting strategic objectives and how they compare with forecasted expectations.
"The OMV portal had a highly complex technical infrastructure featuring several Web and application servers, load balancers and a clustered database in a high-availability environment. All of the data processing and report generation is performed automatically each night with SAS so we get refreshed reports every morning," said OMV's Robl.
SAS Web Analytics takes enormous volumes of clickstream and other Web data, loads it into an open, flexible data warehouse and integrates it with other data sources. By analysing this data, SAS Web Analytics enables companies to determine the effectiveness of their Web sites and make the appropriate offer to the right customer at the right time.
SAS Web Analytics also delivers flexible reporting and interactive visualisation tools to help companies share Web channel information throughout their organisations and understand the impact of key performance indicators (KPI) on the bottom line.
Using clickstream data for customer intelligence
If customers can't find what they're looking for on a site, they will not come back. SAS Web Analytics uses advanced analytic techniques and visualisation tools to enable marketers to:
* Determine how customers are getting to a site and where they go once they get there.
* Discover what kind of information they look for.
* Find out at what point they drop off or lose their way.
Armed with this information, marketers can more accurately predict customer clickstream behaviour to design their Web sites for maximum customer satisfaction - which in turn will lead to improved customer retention and loyalty.
Linking the Web channel with business goals
The business scorecard within SAS Web Analytics provides at-a-glance information on the performance of the Web site and employs analytics to identify the key drivers of each performance indicator. This provides easy diagnosis of problems and a suggested course of action to make changes to Web site design, product placement and Web offers that will reduce customer attrition, increase customer satisfaction, boost site "stickiness" and meet corporate Web objectives via increased revenue and decreased costs.
The SAS Web Analytics announcement came at SAS Forum International 2004 (http://www.sas.com/sasforuminternational), the most extensive business intelligence conference outside the US. Formerly known as SeUGI (SAS European Users Group International), the name was changed this year to better describe the conference's role as a forum for exchanging ideas, best practices and future directions in business intelligence.
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40 000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.
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