Managing the Market

Carlson Marketing Group selects SAS' leading analytical solution to enable effective data access and manipulation

Understanding your customers is crucial in today's competitive marketplace. Even more so is understanding how to attract and retain them. To reach this goal, many organizations turn to companies such as Carlson Marketing Group to provide clearer insight into customer behavior.

At the foundation of Carlson Marketing Group's approach to delivering leading relationship marketing strategies for clients is the company's belief that building better relationships drives business results and makes for more satisfied customers, employees and suppliers.

Established in the United States in 1938 and in Australia around 12 years ago, Carlson Marketing Group is an expert in designing and executing customer, employee and channel relationship marketing programs on behalf of major organizations, including several in the financial services sector.

Increasingly, one of the company's key service offerings is to apply analytical solutions and predictive modeling to develop highly segmented marketing strategies to ensure best practice customer acquisition and retention programs. By adopting this unique approach, Carlson Marketing Group provides a platform for clients to effect next purchase customer behavior.

Dicken Doe, head of analytics at Carlson Marketing Group, says the services they provide to companies often rely heavily on data manipulation. "Data manipulation is becoming an increasingly important focus for Carlson Marketing Group," Doe says.

"We handle some vast customer and transactional databases and we need to be able to supply reports and analysis to our clients quickly. We had been using our own bespoke tools for several years and while these had served us well, we were finding more and more that we needed to upgrade to a more flexible, high-performing system to allow us to do what we, and our clients, really needed. Earlier this year, we went to tender to try and find a supplier that could help us."

The main requirements for the new system were expertise in data manipulation, applied analytics and rapid statistical application. Another ancillary but still important requirement was the ability to be able to work with two different software solutions used by Carlson Marketing Group's international offices in the United States and the UK - one of which was SAS.

Carlson Marketing Group purchased an analytical solution from SAS running on a server.

"We spoke with four companies including SAS," Doe says. "SAS won hands down with data manipulation and was one of the best with applied analytics."

"SAS is important for us because it provides a scalable environment to help with data access and manipulation," Doe says. "It also helps reduce our programming time. One of the benefits we've seen since implementing the SAS solution is that we are completing tasks for our clients much more quickly. Typically, we are reducing that time required by 50 percent."

Doe says there were a few challenges with the implementation but this was mainly caused by the local Carlson Marketing Group IT team having limited SAS experience. "We were implementing a comprehensive client-server package and we had a few issues to sort through but with help from SAS, everything was operational within two weeks and we haven't had any issues with the solution since then."

In addition to the decreased turnaround times, Doe says the company is in a position to now able to take on different types of projects.

"One of the major reasons for buying SAS over competitor products is that it is far superior to anything else on the market. It has great rapid statistical application for building scoring and grouping models for operational purposes – Carlson Marketing Group can now offer this additional functionality to our clients.

"Our functionality has improved and we are working on client projects we would not have considered before," he says. "The type of information we are supplying to clients is also changing the way they do business. One client has altered their entire approach to loyalty programs based on the model we provided to them. This is a major development that SAS was instrumental in."

Another benefit to Carlson Marketing Group is that the Australian office is now in sync with the SAS solution used by its U.S. office. "We can now take the intellectual property used by our U.S. office and implement it here," Doe says. "Alternatively, we can do the reverse and if we develop solutions in areas that the U.S. office has yet to focus on, we are able to provide valuable IP in return. As a result, we are aligning ourselves more closely with our international offices, and increasingly providing our clients with a pool of valuable global expertise."

SAS' reputation in the marketplace has meant that Doe could be confident in the solution's ability to deliver. "I knew that if there were any issues with the implementation I would be able to fall back on SAS' expertise," he says. "We were one of the early users of SAS®9 in Australia and when any glitches occurred, SAS were able to draw on the knowledge of their consultants from all over the world to help."

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