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Viseca Card Services Charges Ahead with CRM from SAS^®

Viseca Card Services (Viseca), located near Zürich, is the second-largest company marketing Visa and Master Card credit cards in Switzerland.

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about Viseca Card Services and its successes with SAS.

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Dr. Michael Flaschka
Manager Customer Care Center, Viseca Card Services

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Herbert Bucheli
Manager Business Analysis, Viseca Card Services

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Viseca's main concern was to strengthen market share during stagnant economic times in an increasingly competitive industry. To this end, Viseca sought to aggressively pursue their marketing efforts to increase customer retention and revenue turnover, and to prevent customer churn. They needed the help of a powerful data management and analysis solution, and SAS Customer Relationship Management Solutions (CRM) provided them with the key to increase their competitive advantage.

CRM - A Profitable Strategy
Dr. Michael Flaschka, manager of Viseca's Customer Care Centre, declares that Viseca's goal is to be number one in quality in the Swiss credit card market in one year.

"We are of the opinion that we must learn to better manage every customer relationship, because every customer has the potential to provide us with more profit," says Dr. Flaschka. "Customer lifetime value is, of course, an important source of revenue for Viseca Card Services. The longer the contract term and the higher the average turnover, the higher the basis of revenue becomes for the company as a whole. Therefore, we are very interested in better knowing how customers behave, and finding ways and means that permit us to raise the turnover per year or over the whole duration of the contract."

"What is clear is that CRM is critical," Dr. Flaschka continues. "We want to make profitable arrangements with our customers. And therefore the prime task of a credit card company is to manage customer relations in such a way that it yields a profit and that it continues to yield a profit. Strengthening and further developing CRM is at the core of our company and departmental strategies."

Herbert Bucheli, head of the business analysis group, concurs. "We need to prove that we can identify successful customers and retain them. We wanted to try to use churn prevention campaigns so that we get the kind of customers who we believe will stay with us for a longer period of time."

Viseca was looking to implement their campaigns based on data analysis that recognizes trends, deduces the number of customers who might leave, shows certain patterns through combined new elements, and permits the development of service qualities that didn't before exist.

SAS Leads the Way
Viseca was clearly aware of what they needed to do to get on track, and they turned to SAS, a leader in CRM solutions, to set them in the right direction.

"It is vitally important to retain customers in the credit card market, as it is more cost efficient to maintain existing customers rather than to acquire new ones, although we also emphasize acquisition as a strategic orientation," says Dr. Flaschka. "By using SAS analytical CRM solutions, we now have a model that comprises the entire customer lifetime cycle, beginning with acquisition right through retention."

"With the help of SAS, we have been able to accelerate the business analysis process, and this is a significant advantage," continues Dr. Flaschka. "We now have the possibility to identify the different customer segments much more specifically, which also improves cost efficiency. SAS' powerful system solutions support our efforts to gain the intelligence we need to eliminate pains. I think that through the use of SAS solutions, we have been able to react quickly and proactively to new trends."

"With SAS' help we have developed an efficient solution that is a nerve centre for Viseca," Dr. Flaschka adds. "The system architecture that supports CRM at Viseca is two-tiered, comprising an analytical part and an operational part. With the help of SAS, we created the basis to develop CRM strategically and to support it with efficient tools. In the analytical sphere, we have a central database where all customer information is located. This is used to analyze customer behaviour, and the results from this analysis are used to create actionable programs."

Campaign Analysis
"We have got a customer portfolio of about 870,000 customers or cards. Therefore, we've got 870,000 sets of data, and these customers conduct between 20 to 22 million transactions with credit cards. That is about 50 gigabytes of data per year that we process with SAS solutions," says Bucheli. "SAS helps us answer our business questions with explorative data analyses. We don't know beforehand which data will be important for the campaigns we want to carry out. We've got certain ideas, but it is the SAS solutions that decide which data are pertinent and relevant for the development of further models."

"A concrete case in point of SAS' role at Viseca is of a preliminary campaign designed to raise turnover in cards," states Bucheli. "We wanted to ensure that a customer used a credit card product when he or she made their next purchase. So we tried to analyze this scenario and SAS helped us to fine tune and direct the campaign. We began by analyzing responses: determining how many customers reacted to our campaign and then employing methods to measure which campaign aspects helped us to develop a winning process. This knowledge helped us to later analyze campaign results and see whether this reflected in the turnover. We want to measure our campaign success and to raise customer lifetime value, and SAS helps us enormously in this endeavour."

"I prefer complete solutions, especially in analysis systems, because it simplifies things. And it is also important in respect to training analysts, because they won't have to learn five or six different tools," continues Bucheli. "There are other analytical tools that are similar, but SAS offers a complete solution, especially in the area of data management analyses, and this is a decisive factor in the success of a CRM solution."

Intelligent Solutions Provide Competitive Advantage
CRM, by its nature, is a wide-ranging discipline that comprises several aspects of company management, and SAS, as a market leader in CRM technology, provided Viseca with a comprehensive and successful CRM strategy.

"SAS as a company, and also as a system solution, enables us to develop intelligence solutions and processes. Without the support of SAS, it would be much more difficult for us to go through this CRM learning process," declares Flaschka. "I would say that, quite clearly, SAS offers 'the power to know.' SAS supports an interaction between people, solutions, and system platforms, which together make business intelligence possible."

"SAS offers us a clear competitive advantage because it permits us to derive real connections from quantitative data," concludes Flaschka. "We can now develop risk prevention models in order to minimize default risks in connection with the use of credit cards. With the help of SAS, we quite clearly have the potential for saving costs and improving profits. We found that SAS is a very competent partner who can offer a complete solution from A to Z. We are sure that we shall have a positive return on this investment."

"I can only say, yes, SAS provides us with ROI," agrees Bucheli. "Personally, I've had a lot of experience in Oracle databases and other vendors' relational database systems, and SAS surprises me every day as far as its outstanding performance is concerned. We needed a powerful data management and analysis tool for CRM, and SAS provided us with the right solution. I'm convinced of the competitive advantage of using SAS CRM solutions."

About Viseca
Viseca Card Services, based in Zürich, markets and distributes Visa and Master Card credit cards. Viseca is one of the biggest companies in this industry in Switzerland, with 120 employees and approximately 870,000 credit card contracts. These contracts comprise several customer segments, including traditional bank-branded credit cards, which have a specific, visible relationship with the banking partner and are embossed with the bank's logo, as well as neutral credit card products, which have no direct relationship with a bank. The almost 870,000 cards in circulation consist of two-thirds bank credit cards and one-third neutral credit cards, including a certain number of company credit cards that also count as neutral cards.

Dr. Michael Flaschka
Customer Care Centre manager, Viseca Card Services