In November last year, business publisher and advisory
serviceWolters Kluwer piloted a business intelligence
systemfromSAS to consolidate the view of its
customers and improve the return on its marketing and sales
campaigns.
In just seven weeks, SAS was able to build a consolidated
customer view, which was used to run several successful marketing
campaigns. The best results were seen in the tax and finance
divisions, where one of the campaigns returned three times the
expected revenue target. Other campaigns aimed at setting
appointments for field sales also yielded much improved results
with the call success rate increasing by 30%. All of this was
attributed to improved targeting and campaign management.
Wolters Kluwer UK provides legal publications and services to
businesses to help them comply with tax and governance laws. The
company has annual revenues of £2.6bn, and employs about 18,400
people worldwide with operations across Europe, North America, and
Asia Pacific.
To gain a more accurate view of its interaction with clients,
the firm worked with SAS to build what it calls a "customer
management framework" based on the SAS Enterprise Intelligence
Platform. It draws data from more than 50 sales and marketing
systems including the publisher's main SAP system as well as its
CRM system from GoldMine software.
With direct access to the SAP data structure, the SAS Enterprise
Intelligence Platform could draw most of the data it needed
directly from the source. The system also has direct access to
other common databases such as Oracle and
IBM's DB2 through the application programming interface, open
database connectivity or SQL scripting.
Because SAS had direct access to the SAP data structures, there
was practically no drop in the performance of core SAP systems
while the data extraction took place, says Steven Georgiadis, head
of customer intelligence with SAS. "We sucked more than a million
records from the SAP system in Germany in not much more than an
hour, but the SAP administrators said their was very little impact
at their end."
Data was treated and formatted using the SAS data-quality
address system and address-management tools from QAS, an Experian
company. Georgiadis says that this automates the process of
bringing data into a standard format. "There are many different
ways of expressing the same information, for example something as
simple as a business address can be written in many different
forms."
One advantage of the SAS approach to this process is that the
metadata, which describes the data structure, is captured and
documented throughout the data integration and transformation
process. This later helps speed access to information by automating
and simplifying the most common data-access tasks when building new
business-intelligence applications based on the same information
sources.
Using the SAS tools, Wolters Kluwer created a coherent view of
all its customer interactions within a single Oracle-based data
warehouse. Marketing and promotions users were then able to
scrutinise this data from a number of different "views". This
included being able to search by period of time, product type or
geography to test the how effective marketing campaigns had been
and help design future campaigns with more knowledge of success
factors.
The end-user graphic interface is presented through a web
browser, so there is no need to load software on the user's
desktop. This helped the business deploy the initial pilot phase of
the project within seven weeks, in a process akin to rapid
application development, Georgiadis says.
From the outset, the project looked for measurable business
benefits including increased revenue, reduced costs of marketing
investment and improved market share as a result of campaigns.
The results from the pilot programme were dramatic. Retention
rates have improved and are now fully measurable across all aspects
of the business. For example, at CCH, a Wolters Kluwer company that
provides tax and business law information, customer retention has
improved from 75% to 83% since the introduce of the SAS business
intelligence system. Efficiency has improved as well: return on
marketing spending is up threefold.
Meanwhile, conversion rates on sales calls have also improved
since calls are now based on better information using the system.
Conversion of sales calls to speaking to a decision-maker has
improved from one in 33 to one in 11, and converting that
conversation into a sale has improved from one in 12 to one in
eight.
Mike Turner, business systems manager at Wolters Kluwer, says,
"We needed to address the way in which we engaged with our
customers to ensure that we were maximising the relationship we
have with them. A partnership with SAS has enabled us to take the
first steps towards the greater understanding we need in the
provision of products and services to that client base."