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British Gas uses SAS analytics to reach customers

By Brian McKenna

British Gas, one of the UK’s energy suppliers, is to use SAS analytics to improve marketing efficiency.

Combining SAS reporting and analytics capabilities, British Gas said it is implementing a system that will optimise outbound marketing campaigns. The analytical capability is being provided as a service by SAS.

Steve Thomas, head of campaign decisioning at British Gas, said: “We’re looking to improve the response rate to campaigns by using analytics to tailor our offer to each individual customer. Ours is a highly competitive market, and we want to better understand our customers through improved analytics.”

Mike Pell, executive director of SAS UK & Ireland, commented: “Meeting customer needs is a major challenge for energy providers, and one of the reasons is the lack of insight to deliver what customers really want.”

Systems deployed by British Gas:

• SAS Marketing Optimisation – lets users accurately predict how constraints will affect overall contact strategy, so that common problems such as contacting customers too often or too little and exceeding budgets can be avoided.
• SAS^® Visual Analytics – enables organisations to map out and understand analytic insights and share those with employees and customers. It delivers in-memory analysis and interactive dashboards for reporting in-depth data visualisation.