SAS underwrites Metropolitan's CRM plans

Metropolitan Life, one of the largest financial services groups in Southern Africa, has implemented an analytical customer relationship management (CRM) solution from SAS Institute. The SAS implementation is the first building block in Metropolitan Life's customer analysis initiatives, which aim to retain and grow profitable customers to the benefit of all stakeholders.

Mark Watson, Account Manager at SAS Institute South Africa, says: "Metropolitan Life has embraced the concept of CRM as it understands this to be the key to ensuring its continued success as a leader in the financial services industry. The SAS Solution for analytical CRM will allow Metropolitan Life to obtain a better understanding of its customers as individuals, and to develop a better understanding and anticipation of their needs and behaviour."

"Our view on CRM is that it's a philosophy, and not just a set of technologies," says AJ Kruger, Senior Manager: Client Management at Metropolitan Life. "The success of CRM initiatives depends on establishing a learning relationship with customers. Customer data must be analysed through a process of continuous data gathering at all customer contact points, turning that data into knowledge necessary to understand and predict customer behaviour, but at the same time making it an enjoyable experience for the customers."

Using the SAS CRM solution, a model was developed that determines the propensity of a policy to lapse within the first 12 months from commencement date. "This allows Metropolitan to manage risk of new business from a conservation perspective. We're effectively going beyond a pure underwriting focus when we assess risk, and are now focusing on the management of the conservation risk of new business as well," Kruger says.

CRM will also aid Metropolitan Life in its future customer acquisition initiatives by profiling customers for future marketing drives and ensuring that the right offer is made to the right client through the right channel. "A further spin-off would be to use the SAS solution to build retention models that will address conservation at a later stage, beyond the first year for example," says Kruger. "The end goal is to determine a customer's life-time value to the company, and then provide appropriate levels of service to more closely match their individual requirements."

"This is only the start for Metropolitan Life," explains Retha Keyser, CRM Solutions Architect for SAS South Africa. "With the SAS Solution, Metropolitan Life will not only be able to develop and refine their CRM strategies, but potentially be able to extend the return on their investment by addressing some of their other analytical needs. The SAS analytical capabilities are also used successfully by other organisations world-wide to prevent fraud, perform actuarial analysis, optimise re-insurance, analyse credit risk and perform Web analysis."

Metropolitan Life decided on SAS Institute's CRM solution after stringent selection criteria were considered from all players in the CRM arena, both locally and globally. "SAS provided the best fit for our requirement, in terms of it being an integrated solution and offering project delivery within the required parameters, which, in Metropolitan's case, were compatibility with existing technology and processes.

"SAS furthermore demonstrated industry experience with proven case studies locally and globally, where SAS had applied CRM methodologies with great success in the financial services industry," concludes Kruger.