SAS Interaction Management combines real-time behaviour tracking with analytics to improve customer profitability

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, recently announced the general availability of SAS Interaction Management 1.1, a real-time event-driven marketing solution that tracks individual customer behaviour and enables businesses to deliver timely, relevant communications to improve customer profitability, growth and retention.

SAS Interaction Management makes customer relationships more profitable by delivering meaningful one-to-one customer communications that combine SAS's core strength in analytics with real-time behaviour tracking, thereby enabling marketers to deliver precise offers at just the right moment.

SAS Interaction Management improves customer response rates via:

* Real-time identification of marketing opportunities for retention, cross-sell and up-sell much earlier in the customer lifecycle;

* Right-time execution that can be made in real-time either in response to customer-driven (in-bound) queries or as an event driven outbound communication;

* Accurate, high impact offers based on focused, one-to-one targeting of customers; and

* The ability to apply industry-leading SAS analytics to predict, quantify and plan successful marketing programmes.

By improving response rates and reducing marketing costs, Interaction Management dramatically increases return on investment (ROI) and overall customer satisfaction.

"A bad offer doesn't get better in real-time," said Phil Winters, vice-president of customer intelligence at SAS. "Only SAS can apply deep analytics to data from all customer channels in order to define the appropriate offer for execution at the right time via any customer touch-point. Competitors either lack the analytic ability needed to provide meaningful value or can only focus on the limited customer channels within their real-time offerings."

Many organisations lack the ability to track customers individually, viewing them instead only as a member of one of several segments. As a result, they miss opportunities when a customer's behaviour doesn't follow his or her "normal" pattern. SAS Interaction Management equips organisations to achieve the highest level of customer intelligence by providing the capability to track and understand customers in a true one-to-one fashion. Only SAS looks at every customer individually, receiving live transactions from all customer-related front and back office systems. The SAS solution immediately applies transactions to update the customer profile while retaining a history of past behaviour in order to provide the context needed for complete customer understanding.

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Timeliness of customer intelligence is critical. Businesses frequently learn that a customer is preparing to leave only after it is too late to prevent them from doing so. Companies need to be armed to take action with cross-sell or service opportunities that are appropriately timed to meet the customer's needs. Well before a customer actually calls to close an account, SAS Interaction Management can identify at-risk customers with information derived from real-time behaviour tracking. SAS Interaction Management sends an alert that enables marketing to intervene much earlier in the customer lifecycle, thereby accelerating a sale or avoiding customer attrition. By having timely insight into customers' current and future behaviour, organisations can recognise immediate - and likely passing - opportunities to increase the value of those individual relationships and focus on creating appropriate, profit-producing and loyalty-building customer communications. SAS Interaction Management can increase the profitability of marketing programmes by making offers in real-time either in response to a customer in-bound communication or an outbound communication timed uniquely to an individual customer.

Absa Group, one of the leading financial service providers in SA, is a customer of SAS Customer Intelligence solutions. "Our exposure to SAS Interaction Management came as far back as September of last year. We are currently exploring this exciting new development and believe that it could significantly enhance our strengths in analytics within Absa. This, in my opinion, is the future, moving beyond rules-based engines," said Pramod Mohanlal, general manager of knowledge discovery and dissemination at Absa Group.

In addition to identifying unusual activity, SAS Interaction Management is the only solution that recognises inactivity in a given customer's behaviour. For example, the SAS solution gives a warning as soon as a customer's activity declines below normal so that the company can intervene proactively to improve success rates.

"Although much is made of the concept of real-time, in reality the right time is much more important," said Gareth Herschel, research director at Gartner. "To resolve this issue of poor timing, companies are looking at customer events to provide a signal that the customer is likely to be receptive to a particular offer. Organisations using event-driven interactions experience a success rate of around 20% versus a 3% success rate typical for traditional campaign-driven interactions."

Accuracy of customer intelligence brings high impact in customer communication decisions. SAS is the only company able to apply deep analytics to data from all customer channels in order to define the best offer for execution at the right time via any customer touch-point. By combining real-time tracking with powerful predictive analysis, SAS helps marketers recognise changes in behaviour weeks to months earlier and much more accurately than competing solutions. This allows organisations to improve several key customer metrics such as response time, retention rate and cross-sell and up-sell conversions.

"According to Gartner, the cost to acquire a customer is nearly six times the cost to retain an existing one. By improving an organisation's ability to retain customers, SAS Interaction Management pays for itself in a matter of months," said Winters. "In an early pilot, a US-based Fortune 100 bank with an existing business rules-based solution in place found that SAS Interaction Management's behaviour-based alerts were twice as accurate as the business rule triggers at identifying households that would close their account within 12 months. In addition, this organisation realised an increase of more than 35% on saved balances over and above just using the rule-based system."

Many organisations have invested huge sums of money in operational customer relationship management (CRM) systems that don't provide a sustainable return on investment. These systems collect valuable customer information but don't provide intelligence about whom to target for cross-sell, up-sell and retention. While some operational systems provide alerts, these alerts typically are not relevant or channel-specific. SAS provides real-time customer intelligence to power increased return on investment from operational CRM systems while improving efficiency, effectiveness and consistency of CRM activities across channels.

Benefits to the customer include focused, personalised and relevant communications in a time frame that is on their terms. They receive information of interest, not spam. The decrease in needless, unwanted or ill-timed communications drastically reduces treatment delivery costs and increases response rates for all other contact channels.

The announcement of the release of SAS Interaction Management 1.1 was made on 18 June at the 21st annual SAS European Users Group International conference in Vienna, Austria, attended by thousands of SAS customers and staff from around the world.