Sydney, Australia (September 21, 2007) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence, has announced SAS Real-Time Decision Manager to help marketers coordinate interactive marketing across multiple channels. The new solution in SAS’ customer intelligence suite, which uses analytically driven decision logic to increase the effectiveness of every customer interaction, ships in December 2007.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS APPLIED IN REAL-TIME

Today’s customers expect a personalised experience whether it’s through the Web, call centre or other customer touchpoints. They want to be sure that their needs are addressed and that they are treated as individuals.

SAS Real-Time Decision Manager is designed to provide the intelligence that drives this type of personalised experience. When SAS Real-Time Decision Manager receives a decision request from an operational system it combines all available customer data with SAS Analytics and business logic in real-time to determine the best response for the customer, such as:

• Make a recommendation on a customer’s eligibility to receive a particular offer.
• Score a customer’s propensity to buy a certain item.
• Calculate a customer’s credit worthiness based on the latest transactional information.

For example, a customer calls a financial institution to check his account balance and inquire about the minimum balance necessary to avoid a penalty. Based on this new input and the customer’s past behaviour and transaction history, the decision flow determines that this customer has a high probability of leaving for a competitor. Other factors indicate that his profitability is above average and he shows great potential for future returns. Based on this, the decision flow returns a recommendation to make an offer that will increase the probability of retaining this customer. The call centre representative is armed with the best possible information to act upon.

“According to Peppers & Rogers Group, as much as 50 percent of the customer decision-making process takes place in real time,”* said Jeff Levitan, General Manager, SAS Customer Intelligence. “An analytical approach to making those decisions has been proven to drive far greater value than any other approach, the ability to do this in real-time at the point of contact will drive immediate business value.”

INTEGRATED WITH SAS® CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE SOLUTIONS

A key strength of SAS Real-Time Decision Manager is its ability to leverage the SAS Customer Intelligence suite, as well as the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform. An organisation can gather and access information from virtually any system within the enterprise and store it in one central location, allowing inbound and outbound sales and marketing activities to be tightly coordinated. Sharing a common user interface and common customer information with several SAS solutions, this new addition to the SAS suite of enterprise marketing solutions will enable companies to optimise every customer interaction to improve revenue, growth, and retention.

MAKING MARKETING DEPARTMENTS MORE INDEPENDENT

With SAS Real-Time Decision Manager, real-time decision criteria can be managed by marketers through an easy-to-use graphical interface rather than being hard-coded in a call centre or Web-based system. Now, marketers can make necessary changes on their own, reacting and driving changes at the speed of business - not the speed of IT development cycles.*

*Peppers & Rogers Group, "Stop Random Acts of CRM," 2005