In an effort to provide marketers with customer data multiple sources to create a more seamless consumer experience, the SAS Institute unveiled its Customer Intelligence 360 tool at its recent global forum. The company says the product enables delivery of customized, contextually-driven messaging by combining data from multiple online and offline sources into a complete picture of the customer.
The tool includes SAS’s predictive analytics capabilities to pull disparate data together and make recommendations based on them, providing a way to target each customer and present offers that appeal to him or her.
For example, analytical procedures determine when and where to place personalized content onto web pages or in mobile applications.
SAS says 360’s easy of use is what will set it apart from other customer intelligence offerings. It is designed for digital marketers who may not have a lot of in-house analytics expertise, offering built-in analytical processes, automatic segmentation and self-learning algorithms that help predict what will and won’t work.
It also extends digital capabilities to allow marketers to address more channels, devices, and points in time. The National Bank, for example, has 27 customer interaction channels, according to Yann Jodoin, senior vice-president of client strategy, marketing and branding at the bank. He says it’s difficult to understand how and when customers are using each channel.
For example, if a customer begins a credit card application online, and then phones the call centre to complete the process, they expect that the call centre agent will have all of the information that had been provided so far. If not, the customer journey is less than satisfactory, and that may mean they’ll abandon the transaction. Stitching together the channels into a seamless whole allows the agent to pick up where the customer left off online. Jodoin’s team of 40 data scientists use SAS products to model that usage.
The models also have turned campaign generation upside down. “In the past, with traditional marketing, you had strategists create campaigns and then go to the data scientists and ask them to pull a list based on them,” Jodoin said. “Now more and more, upstream, we get data scientists finding predictive behaviour and modelling it. And the strategy and campaigns are created based on those insights.”
Customer Intelligence 360, which is provided as a subscription service accessed through a Web browser, has two modules to begin with. 360 Discover provides reporting and insights based on web and mobile behavioural data, and can incorporate customer information to understand more of the behaviours individual customers have as they are interacting with the brand. Reports shows marketers which activities are working, what content performs best, which customer segments to focus on, and the best sequence for an individual customer’s experience.
The other module, 360 Engage, takes what Discover has accumulated and adds inputs from other sources such as point of sale systems or contact centre interactions to improve engagements with the customer.
The company plans to roll out other capabilities throughout 2016, including discovery of email and social media interactions.
