Burda Ciscom subscribes to SAS Customer Intelligence for analytic CRM and real-time performance results

Burda Ciscom is an application service provider for parent company Burda Direct and external customers. The Burda Direct Group began operations over a decade ago with only 14 employees. Since then, the company has grown into a major media and magazine distributor with more than 1,200 employees and an annual turnover of 200 million euros (US$245 million). Burda Ciscom focuses on direct marketing activities, retention and sales on a customer base of more than 8 million active subscriptions.

Burda Ciscom already had the necessary systems for gathering and storing operational customer data that is standard for any sizable media company, and it had been engaging in basic customer relationship management (CRM). The company sought to increase revenues by strategically cross-selling and up-selling other products. After all, when you already have valuable information about people who already want what you're selling, why not use it to keep them happy and offer them more of what they want?

To do this effectively, executives knew they had to understand their customers in ways that exceeded the capabilities of operational reporting systems. To accomplish their goal, employees needed analytic CRM that would enable them to create more targeted marketing campaigns and achieve greater customer profitability.

Flexible solutions and a single version of the truth
Customer retention is crucial, especially where magazine subscriptions are concerned. "Subscriptions usually run just one or two years, in some cases three or four years. But if we can convince a customer to extend for even just one more year, it has a very measurable and positive effect on our profitability," explains Alexander Markert, Manager of Business Development. Markert is responsible for all marketing, sales and public relations activities at Burda Ciscom.

"Three or four years ago, we had a very monolithic and inflexible software solution," continues Markert. "We wanted to begin using analytic customer relationship management to know who our customers were and what other products we could offer to them. And of course, we wanted to be smart about how much money we spent on our marketing activities and campaigns, while making them 'sharper'. So we defined several marketing and sales and services processes and began talking to various software vendors. We chose SAS for our data warehouse, analytics and all of our reporting needs, as well as data mining. We feel that SAS was really the best partner to choose."

End-to-end customer intelligence
"SAS really understood our business and they are the market leader. They have the best tools and they were the only ones who really delivered an end-to-end solution," adds Markert. "When we started our project, we identified more than 200 reports, and nobody really understood what to make of these reports. Now, we have refined our customer intelligence analytics and we're using just 10 or 20 reports. We know what is going on, and we can use this information in real time. We have a single version of the truth inside our database and this is really a big advantage." Reports can be viewed in either PDF or XTML format so that employees in each department can see the information they need in the format they prefer.

Executives at Burda Ciscom saw immediate results after implementing SAS' campaign management analytics. "We immediately saw which target groups were really responding to our new products," continues Markert. "We could quickly determine what was happening, which campaigns were profitable and which ones were not. Knowing this, we can easily refine our campaigns and achieve the right balance of contact with our customers. Now, we can deliver all ETL processes up to data mining, and we don't have to use four or five DBAs, we can just keep the system running."

Supporting every level of the organization
While "analytic CRM" might be a term to strike fear in the hearts of those who aren't accustomed to either creating it or interpreting it, SAS solutions provide customer intelligence quickly and in ways that make it easily understood by people on every level. It answers complex operational questions and reveals hidden insights by simplifying the relationships between cause and effect, and even predicting future outcomes.

"SAS is used for data cleansing prior to address selection, and certainly our IT people are using it to provide various services for our publishing houses, but also SAS is used within the publishing houses themselves," concludes Markert. "Marketing executives, even vice presidents, use our solution. They really want to know how the company is performing at the moment - and with just a click or two, they are able to see what is happening inside our organization, which campaign is running at the moment, which ones are doing well or not. Everybody can use it."

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