Data quality lifts sales efforts
BMC Software
BMC uses SAS to organize and standardize customer data.
Zero
duplicate records
BMC Software achieved this using • SAS® Data Management
BMC Software achieves real-time data quality to meet customer demands
Like many fast-growing tech companies, BMC Software accumulates vast amounts of customer data in its CRM system. Data quality was an issue – many different employees added data to the system, often creating nonstandard or duplicate records.
The impact of inconsistent, inaccurate and unreliable data was a drag on sales efforts. With poor-quality data in the CRM system, the sales team struggled to communicate effectively with customers. Additionally, bad data resulted in inaccurate sales forecasts and affected other aspects of business development.
"Put simply, data quality dramatically affects our customer-facing initiatives," says Kelly Williams, Data Analyst for BMC. "We needed a solution capable of codifying our business rules for data quality and enforcing them in both batch and real-time environments.
Adding SAS to our CRM efforts has enhanced our ability to meet customer demands and find ways to grow into new markets. Kelly Williams Data Analyst BMC Software
A unified customer view
To meet the growing need for high-quality data, BMC began a data quality and integration program designed to identify and resolve duplicate records, in batch and real time. The initiative also concentrated on validating addresses – both primary and secondary – to help build a more unified customer view.
BMC selected SAS® Data Management to address its data quality issues. With SAS, BMC can visually design workflows for data quality and integration rules.
Additionally, SAS provides a real-time environment to use those rules via a service-oriented architecture, allowing the company to find and resolve issues before the data reaches the application.
BMC Software – Facts & Figures
$2.2 billion
annual revenue
6,700
employees
92%
Forbes Global 100 companies served
No more duplicates
As BMC expands its sales efforts, SAS ensures high-quality data to fuel better customer outreach. Now, as new data enters the CRM system, SAS real-time data quality and integration rules ensure new customers and accounts aren’t duplicates of existing records. If a duplicate is found, the user has the option to append the existing customer record.
"With SAS, we have the power to look at more than the primary address for matching accounts," Williams adds. "SAS was the only vendor that allowed us to use secondary addresses and other details to match duplicates."
SAS also gives managers and executives more confidence in sales forecasts and pipeline projections. Now, the list of prospects is more consistent and reliable, leading to a more accurate view of the sales cycle.
"In that way, adding SAS to our CRM efforts has enhanced our ability to meet customer demands and find ways to grow into new markets," says Williams.
Next steps
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The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.