Customer-centricity helps boost profits for Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer UK, part of the leading global information services, consulting and publishing company, is seeing a dramatic uplift in marketing campaign responses and sales conversions thanks to a SAS-driven customer-centric approach

Under the brand names Croner and CCH, Wolters Kluwer UK provides publications, information and consulting services that help businesses and professionals comply with constantly changing laws in key areas including tax and accountancy, health and safety and human resources. Worldwide, the company has annual revenues of around €3.7 billion and employs over 19,000 people.

This marketplace is characterised by constant change, in terms of the up-to-date knowledge and services the company must offer plus the shifting needs of clients; SAS is now helping Wolters Kluwer better understand and so offer more to customers. “From the start, our results amazed me,” says Mike Turner, Head of MIS. “We hadn’t been expecting an increase in average order value but that’s what we saw. Depending on what a customer bought, the average order was £2,500 to £3,500. After implementing SAS®, average order value went up to £4,000. We also carried out year-on-year sales comparisons. One year prior to SAS, the number of appointments converted into sales across key business areas like HR and health and safety was 1 in 15. Using SAS the ratio was 1 in 7.25 - more than a 50 percent improvement. We’d been aiming for a ratio of 1 in 10.

“These are highly significant results: an increase in sales conversion ratios plus an increase in order values, across our business mix and consistent over months. SAS played a key role in achieving this, providing the infrastructure, the ‘glue’, that holds it all together. We are seeing both quantitative and qualitative improvements. The return on investment from our marketing spend is up three-fold. Overall, we saw a Project ROI Ratio of 2.25:1.” Measurable ROI has been provided through improvements in four critical areas, summarised as ‘REAP’: Retention rates, business Efficiency, customer Acquisition and market Penetration.

A customer-centric strategy for a growing business
Wolters Kluwer had grown by acquisition, and previously took a ‘product-focused’ approach. But it recognised the need for change. “We had a traditional sales model - we would publish a book, say, then think, who can we sell it to?” Turner continues. However, the marketplace was changing. “With so much ‘free to air’ information available, especially via the Internet, we had to switch from this approach to understanding then addressing customer needs.” This required a change in mindset about how the business engaged with customers and what ‘packages’ of information and services it might offer to best meet specific customer requirements, ranging from sole traders to big multinational accountancy and consultancy firms. “Technology is the enabler,” says Turner. “We knew where we wanted to be but not how to get there. SAS has been with us all the way, supporting us through implementation and usage of the system, helping ensure we use it properly.”

He continues, “There can be no ‘single proposition’ – each customer is different. A big issue is customer retention. If you sell ‘Book A’ to a customer then don’t sell them the new edition, or additional information or services related to it, you’ve lost that customer. You need to understand how the customer’s needs have changed so you can offer ‘Book B’ or ‘Service C’ based on that. You can develop the right products and target them at the right people.” Wolters Kluwer wanted a system that would not only deliver customer intelligence and enable targeted marketing and campaign management, but would also deliver the highest levels of data quality to avoid legal issues. SAS provided the solution.

Quality data, quality customer insights
“We’d invested heavily as a European business in SAP as our ERP system, so we looked at SAP CRM and upgrading in-house,” says Turner. “When we analysed the business and our requirements, we realised this wouldn’t meet our needs. So we went out to tender. We also talked to Oracle, but didn’t really get the focus we wanted.” Ultimately, it came down to issues around best-fit and total cost of ownership.

Previously, the business had many individual databases, ranging from corporate systems to a regional salesperson with a laptop database. Growth through acquisition had led to many different pools of data, including customers ‘hidden’ within individual group companies. A key issue was finding a way to obtain an overview of the Wolters Kluwer customer, pulling sources together to drive a customer-focused approach. “We’d assumed we’d have to go to different vendors for different bits of the technology, such as sucking the data out of source systems. We were more than happy for SAS to bid but didn’t really believe they could deliver what we wanted. Now here I am, sitting with a complete end-to-end solution. With the benefit of hindsight it’s clear SAS was the only vendor able to provide what we needed.”

The solution is based on SAS® Marketing Automation software, built on the SAS®9 Enterprise Intelligence  Platform. Data integration capabilities consolidated the numerous data sources including legacy databases and list sources into a single customer-centric database, from which highly targeted marketing campaigns can now be automated, with SAS also used to manage and track campaign success.

Delivering sales results - fast
Development was rapid: in a seven-week pilot, SAS built a consolidated customer view that was used to run several highly successful campaigns, with significantly increased response rates. The best results were in Tax and Finance, where one campaign returned three times the expected revenue target. Meanwhile, campaigns to set appointments for field sales yielded greatly improved results. Wolters Kluwer attributes all of this to improved targeting and campaign management. Turner says, “The results we were getting were stunningly better than before. This not only showed our targeting was far better, but that we also had the ability to take a far more ‘real-time’ approach. We can be more responsive in how we run campaigns, using data extracted in a few days rather than a month before a campaign.”

Another benefit, and clear ROI, has come with resources, notably headcount. “As a result of SAS we improved efficiency through more targeted and cost-effective activity, which meant reduced headcount in marketing by two people. We expect to reduce it further. With the efficiencies SAS brought we no longer needed that overhead. It was a terrific saving for the business, and reducing our overhead made our increased profit look even better. ROI on marketing spend is up three-fold.”

Retaining customers
Turner adds, “Customer retention rates improved and are measurable across our business. For example, in CCH retention increased from 75 to 84 percent, and in Croner from 66 to 73 percent. We are able to address customer needs like never before, to cross and up-sell more effectively and receive additional revenue. We can drive product development in the right direction – for example, publishing a new book around a specific customer need, perhaps a new tax requirement. It’s all about understanding customer psychology, to anticipate their needs. Does a customer prefer information printed or online? Would they like a face-to-face meeting? These new insights and our market-leading products will drive us to reach our stated objective of being the ‘professional’s first choice’. We’ve seen continuous improvements in terms of penetration in our key markets, through multi-channel activity, with month-on-month improvements." Customer acquisition also saw further improvements, with prospect-to-customer conversion rates for ‘Call to Decision Maker’ moving from 1 in 33 to 1 in 11, and ‘Decision Maker to Sale’ from 1 in 12 to 1 in 8.

In short, SAS is now providing Wolters Kluwer with a far clearer understanding of the balance between customer retention and acquisition, with the ability to measure campaign success, feed back to sales teams, bring down sales and marketing costs, and optimise marketing spend.

Turner adds, “SAS delivered what we wanted and far more besides. The benefits of the system today far outweigh where we thought we’d be. It was rolled out as a sales and marketing system but actually became a business management system, in areas ranging from business planning to sales reporting, finances and so on, with key performance indicators built in. SAS has become our core centralised system for marketing, sales and business activity. Having a strong partner is key, and this has been a genuine partnership with SAS.” 

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