Businesses need to really understand their customers to ensure that they talk to them using the right language.

Enticing a Rolex-bedecked, Ferrari owner to buy a product requires very different communications to those needed to persuade the equally wealthy person who proudly drives his Mercedes for 10 years.

Says Deon Cilliers, Customer Intelligence Product Strategy Manager at SAS Institute: "Very often, companies segment their customers at too high a level. If the groupings are too broad, the above two high wealth customers will be placed in the same segment, and dealt with in the same manner. However, they need to be targeted with totally different messages, delivered in different ways."

Only sophisticated customer intelligence solutions can ensure intimate customer understanding.

Along with proper segmentation, businesses face a number of other marketing challenges. These include identifying profitable customers, optimal ways of communicating with different groups of customers, anticipating customer needs and ensuring that customers are not over-solicited.

"Many organisations still cannot identify if a particular customer actually adds to revenues, let alone whether they are profitable," says Cilliers.

It is not worth trying to retain non-profitable customers. The marketing strategy should be to retain the right customers, and to get more of them. To do this, businesses need to know who the right customers are.

They need to understand how to plan and communicate to different groups of customers by optimising marketing campaigns, using all the channels available to them.

Automating this while driving customer needs is also vital. It is too late for a bank to win back a customer who has already closed his or her account. The signs that the customer was about to close his account should have been picked up before it actually happened.

Analytics can help banks to anticipate this, so that if the customer is a profitable one, an appropriate action is initiated. This may be a call from the company's call centre to try and retain him, or a personalised SMS offer, depending on the customer's preferences.

"Many opportunities are missed when the customer initiates interaction with an organisation," says Cilliers.

"If the call centre agent only answers the caller's questions, he or he may be missing out on opportunities to retain the caller, or to cross- or up-sell to the caller."

SAS Solution for Customer Intelligence consists of three major solutions:

• Marketing Automation automates the entire process of sending messages to customers, and manages the process between the marketing strategy and marketing operations.
• Interaction Manager allows organisations to use events in people's lives as triggers for marketing activities.
• Marketing Optimisation maximises the return on marketing activities by ensuring that the best possible offers are made in the best possible manner at the best possible time to a particular customer.

Together, they give businesses the full spectrum of intelligence about their customers, and how to interact with them in the most appropriate and profitable way.