On Top of Its Game

Cisalfa Sport wins the race for customer loyalty with SAS® Analytics

As Italy's largest sports retailer, Cisalfa Sport provides a wide array of apparel, footwear and equipment to help its active customers reach the top of their game. And, thanks to SAS® Analytics, the purveyor of sporting accoutrement is solidifying its place as the top seed in the competition for customer loyalty and profitability.

On your marks …
With an ever-expanding customer base and consistent annual business growth, Cisalfa Sport, with 170 retail outlets located throughout Italy, has accumulated an enormous volume of customer data on the 1.7 million members of its Action loyalty-card program. In order to put the data to good use, the company acquired SAS Analytics to analyze purchasing behaviors, improve customer segmentation to support targeted marketing programs, and perform market basket analysis to optimize its in-store product mix and store organization.

"Knowing the client means understanding the market, promoting the right products at the right time and increasing sales," explains Riccardo Boccalero, CIO, Cisalfa Sport. "Leveraging customer intelligence is a winning strategy, especially during difficult economic times. The challenge for companies today is to sustain growth. Customer intelligence is the lever for acquiring new customers and creating loyalty.

"With SAS, we've acquired analytical techniques for segmenting and profiling clients to support our marketing initiatives," he continues. "We've also built analytical models for market basket analysis to help influence purchases, optimize stock management and increase our cross-selling and up-selling activities."

Get set …
In tandem with its implementation of SAS Analytics, Cisalfa completely redesigned its point-of-sale layouts by sport category, instead of by product category, to make customers shopping experiences more intuitive.

“Market basket analysis techniques were used at pilot sales points to verify the benefits of the new layout in terms of better visibility, greater cross-selling opportunities, increased average purchases and overall volume of sales,” says Boccalero.  In addition, Boccalero says client profiling and segmentation allows the retailer to personalize its contact management initiatives through targeted marketing campaigns.

Go! 
"The strength of SAS Analytics supports our sales strategies and provides us with a detailed view of our client portfolio," he explains. "Using analytics helps us to easily analyze and evaluate the performance of our marketing campaigns and measure redemption rates. Furthermore, by implementing a multichannel strategy supporting our e-commerce site, we have embarked on a new chapter in managing and leveraging the data from our online channel."

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