Boire Filler Group unearths insights in client data with SAS®

Whether working directly with a company’s marketing organization or as an outsourced analytics partner of marketing agencies, Boire Filler Group uses SAS software to resolve marketing challenges common to most industries.

Some clients struggle to acquire new customers at a high cost; others grapple with customer retention while having no idea what their retention rate actually is. Using SAS, the team at Boire Filler Group applies both the technical savvy and marketing strategy know-how to understand client problems and find a solution.

“One of the keys to our success is we’ve always been able to articulate the benefit or value of a solution, using statistical tools from SAS,” said Larry Filler, who cofounded the firm with Richard Boire in 1999. “The software is part of the solution, but we help our clients use the software to their advantage to get specific business results.”

Boire Filler Group started out building tools for clients, but soon became more involved with the application of those tools. “We work with our clients to help them determine their overall marketing strategy,” said Filler. “When they’re exploring their next idea, they’re using more analytics and often using us to assist in applying that analytics know-how.”

The firm is applying SAS in myriad capacities, from helping a client target a particular business opportunity to managing customer data and housing that data in campaign and contact management applications. Once a business challenge is identified, Boire Filler Group consultants audit the client’s data quality.

“When we work with clients, we want to understand how they’re going to apply a solution, because there’s no point in building tools that sit on a shelf,” said Richard Boire, the firm’s other co-founder. “One of the biggest benefits of SAS is the data manipulation component, which makes the data more meaningful.”

Sometimes clients don’t know what they’re looking for, so Boire Filler Group works with them on discovery projects, starting from scratch with their data. Many organizations have data sitting around as a byproduct of their business, and though they’ve heard about analytics and data mining, they have no idea how to get started. This is where the discovery process comes in – to understand the business issues and the data environment, and marry the two together.

One client, for example, had a database of customers who had taken educational courses over several years. The client sent out a catalog to those customers three times a year, but never saw a return on that investment. After a discovery exercise, Boire Filler Group found that a large portion of the client’s customer base hadn’t taken a course in years, and their response rates were so low the client simply wasn’t going to get a return.

“We’ve been able to use SAS tools to evolve a client’s marketing segmentation strategy, allowing them to focus on more recent customers to get a return on their customer campaigns,” said Filler.

SAS allows Boire Filler Group to “get under the hood” by providing a longitudinal view of the customer and being able to summarize and aggregate information over different periods of time. “We fish where the fish are, but we need to manipulate the data to be able to understand it,” said Boire. “That provides valuable insights into business reporting, and SAS allows us to do that.”

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