SAS BI Delivers on Flexirent Customer-Centric Business Requirement

Founded in 1988 and now the market leader in “small ticket” (under $20,000) rental finance in Australia and New Zealand, Flexirent has its services offered through approximately 6,000 active equipment vendors. The company is arguably one of the most recognised names in the local finance industry; and is one that readily embraces best-of-breed technologies to enhance both its operational performance and customer service. Featuring prominently across its business operations is the SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform.

The Customer View
For Flexirent Head of Loyalty, Ben Taylor, the introduction of SAS has brought about one of the most essential capabilities of any organisation that has a strong customer focus – in-depth customer profiling.

“SAS gives us the ability to gain a consolidated view of the customer,” Taylor says. “It used to be the case that we could only identify people based on their contracts. So if a customer had three contracts with us, then there would be no way we could recognise that.

“By giving us the ability to consolidate data from across the organisation, we’ve gained a customer-centric view and realised enormous benefits,” he states.

Among those benefits is a customer retention rate that has more than doubled since the introduction of SAS. According to Taylor, this increase is due to a greater understanding of individual customers, groups of customers and trends in purchasing – an understanding that has been signicantly enhanced within Flexirent by SAS. “Prior to implementing SAS, it was a case of being data rich and information poor,” Taylor explains.

The Information Push Environment
In making the move from a “data rich, information poor” situation to one where information is provided to users in absolute abundance, Flexirent is focusing strongly on the utilisation of SAS’ Web-based information delivery capabilities. Every day, SAS automatically creates a series of reports, which is based on data drawn from a number of Flexirent’s databases that were previously only able to be used in isolation from each other.

Immediately the reports are generated, SAS publishes them to the Flexirent intranet then sends out a series of what Taylor refers to as “teaser” alerts.

“SAS has the ability to send automatic email and SMS alerts when certain events occur,” Taylor explains. “What we’ve done is configure SAS to create a high-level view of each report it generates, then send that view as an SMS message to nominated staff members. This has proven to be a valuable method by which we’re encouraging people to really start getting business value from the information SAS is providing.

“Another feature we’re currently trialling – and one that’s already showing quite a degree of potential – is having SAS tailor specific reports that can be sent to our State Managers’ PDAs via email. Using this feature we will be able to provide those managers with the ability to view the information they need regardless of where they are. It will be, quite literally, in their pocket.”

Drilling Down
According to Taylor, the real value of SAS within Flexirent is plainly evident to users when they start working with the Web-based reports. This enables Flexirent to go beyond just presenting restrictive and static reports that provide little more than information “as is”, the SAS solution enables users to drill down on information, refining their search criteria right down to the individual data item level.

“Our CEO is a great advocate of this,” Taylor says. “If he or anyone else viewing a report, spots anything they believe needs further investigation, it’s simply a case of clicking on the item, which automatically takes them down to the next granular level. It doesn’t matter where that data resides – it’s totally transparent to the user. The big advantage is that if there are no longer any unexplainable or unidentifiable items in a report.”

Managing Risk
One of Flexirent’s greatest SAS advocates is Head of Credit & Risk, Liz Sadler. Having come from a banking background, Sadler had already been a user of SAS in developing scoring model sets to identify potential defaulters. “The ability to identify credit risk relies heavily on the ability to bring together data from different sources and having the tools on hand to make sense of that data,” Sadler states. “With SAS, we’re able to achieve this, regardless of the amount of data, where it is, or its format.”

“Credit scoring is absolutely critical to our business and is essential in gaining the ability to identify with greater accuracy those people who are more likely to default on their payments. With SAS, I’m able to develop performance measures in a fraction of the time it was taking before.”

Going Forward
As the use of SAS extends throughout the Flexirent organisation, other business units are becoming quick to recognise the value it can provide their own operations. One particular example of this is the Flexirent Operational Call Centre.

“The call centre is one of this organisation’s most critical operations,” Taylor states. “We’re a customer centric business and the vast majority of our customer dealings are conducted by call centre operators. By using SAS to improve the management and analysis of call centre data, we will be able to bring about improvements at both the micro and macro levels.”

At the micro level, Flexirent call centre managers could view individual agent’s performance measures such as times on the phone, specific call types and a myriad of other key statistics that are captured by the call centre’s telephone system. It is at the macro level, though, that Taylor believes SAS will bring about major benefits.

“All the micro level information can be easily and quickly aggregated to deliver a report that can immediately identify the precise cause of any call centre bottlenecks,” Taylor explains. “The result is a call centre that can easily be one of the most effective in the industry.”

“With SAS, we have the means by which we can achieve goals that we would never have otherwise been able to even hope for.”

Back to Success Stories