Groupama Develops its Client Knowledge by Decentralizing its Marketing Information System

With revenues of €11.5 billion (US$13.6 billion) in 2002, Groupama is one of the major players in France's insurance market. Founded more than 100 years ago to serve farming interests, Groupama offers products covering all areas of insurance and financing: risk insurance, personal insurance and financial services. Groupama is also a leader in private insurance, including risk, savings and health insurance. The group turned to SAS when it needed help creating client behavior models, improving its database searching and developing a new intranet-based marketing application.

Creation of a common marketing information system
After acquiring GAN, then France's fourth leading insurer, in July 1998, Groupama became one of the three largest general insurance groups in the French market. It distributes its products through several networks: the regional offices of Groupama Assurances, the general agents of GAN Assurances, GAN Eurocourtage, GAN Prévoyance and GAN Patrimoine. The group originally relied on a basic marketing solution based on a relational database, which allowed queries through an interface at the national level.

But Groupama wanted to do more with its data, says Claude Godard, head of the database group of distribution management. "We selected SAS initially to perform statistical studies and rapidly expanded its functionalities to establish behavior models and scoring of product appeal. However, we quickly were faced with volumetrics that were too large to handle," explains Godard.

In 1995, Groupama decided to reorganize its national marketing information system completely under SAS. "This allowed us to develop an interface that permitted the users to establish the application parameters, launch queries and perform analyses," Godard says.

Providing the regions with the decision-making powers
By placing the functionality developed by SAS on an intranet, the company extended the marketing application to all of the group's 200 users. "Since Groupama is a mutual insurance company, each region has decision-making powers," Godard explains. "In 1998, four regions showed the need for the availability of a common application in order to make requests and analyses. Those in charge of our regional marketing were familiar with our database and used its services through a national application, but they did not have direct access. Our objective was to give them access to marketing data irrespective of their location."

Groupama appointed a national correspondent for regional marketing, who specified the requirements of each region in a national database. The regional offices assigned scores as a function of the types of actions they wished to implement to achieve particular targets. Campaigns totaling 300,000 mailings were launched at the national level using two functions previously not accessible to the regional offices: de-duplication in the databases developed under SAS (target "household" and target "individuals") and scoring (improvement of the return rate, targeting and performance). Eleven Groupama regional offices and all of the six GAN Assurances regions now have access to the SAS application using the intranet, which allows them to improve the efficiency and performance of their marketing campaigns.

Expanded marketing functionalities
Groupama also has managed the evolution of the application based on the collective needs of the regional offices and GAN Assurances. The range of functionalities of the application has been greatly broadened to expand beyond action management. The various functions Groupama has implemented include seven services and tools:

1. Geomarketing tool.
2. Client value analysis.
3. Statistical tool (scoring).
4. Data analysis tool.
5. Marketing queries.
6. De-duplication.
7. Administration tools.

An evolutionary solution
Groupama is now preparing a new database structure using SAS, with data that originates from operational customer relationship management. Godard stresses, "We are in the process of recovering all this data in order to analyze it, perform queries and continue to improve our client knowledge. We have not yet determined a limit in terms of volumetry, and currently we are processing approximately 500 gigabytes for all of the databases, which is twice that of last year. This clearly shows the robustness and scalability of SAS solutions."

By doing this, Groupama has given the regional organizations the ability to access the national analytic results easily and to use them in a flexible way. "We have created value by doing this," Godard says. "We have also shared and improved our experiences because we work with the same tool, with the same language, in a field whose main activity involves modeling and exploitation of this modeling. In this sense, the SAS application has become a strategic component of the corporate vision of Groupama."

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