Kelly Williams
Data Analyst
Standardize, organize customer data
BMC Software improves quality, consistence of data
Like many growing companies, BMC Software has been adding customer information to its primary customer relationship management (CRM) system for years. Although the company was a longtime Siebel customer, data quality was an issue. Different employees added data to the company's CRM system, often creating nonstandard or duplicate records.
Adding SAS to our CRM efforts has enhanced our ability to meet customer demands – and find ways to grow into new markets.
The challenge
The impact of inconsistent, inaccurate and unreliable data directly affected the sales team's productivity. If the sales team had poor-quality data in the CRM system, they would not be able to communicate effectively with customers. Additionally, bad data could lead to inaccurate sales forecasts and affect other aspects of new business efforts.
"Put simply, data quality has a dramatic effect on any of our customer-facing initiatives," says Kelly Williams, Data Analyst for BMC Software. "We needed a solution capable of codifying our business rules for data quality – and then enforcing those in both batch and real-time environments."
The solution
To meet the growing need for high-quality data, BMC Software began a data quality and data integration program designed to identify and resolve duplicate records (in batch and real time). The data improvement initiative also concentrated on validating addresses – both primary and secondary – to help build a more unified view of the customer.
BMC Software selected the award-winning SAS® Data Management to visually design workflows for data quality and data integration rules. SAS DataFlux technology provides an environment to utilize those rules via service-oriented architecture (SOA) in real time, allowing the company to find and resolve poor-quality data before it reaches the application.
The results
As BMC expanded its sales efforts, SAS provided high-quality data that fueled better outreach to prospects and customers. Now, as new data enters the Siebel application, SAS real-time data quality and data integration rules ensure that a new customer or a new account isn't a duplicate of an existing record. If it is a duplicate, the user has the ability to append the record of an existing customer.
"With SAS, we have the power to look at more than the primary address for matching accounts," Williams says. "SAS was the only vendor that allowed us to use secondary addresses and other details to match duplicates."
SAS technology also gave 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."
Challenge
BMC's data suffered from issues such as nonstandard entry and duplications.
Solution
Benefits
BMC used SAS Data Management to standardize and organize customer data.
Los resultados que se ilustran en este artículo son específicos a las situaciones, modelos de negocios, datos aportados y entornos de cómputo en particular que se describen aquí. Cada experiencia del cliente de SAS es única basada en variables de negocios y técnicas y todas las declaraciones se deben considerar no típicas. Los ahorros, resultados y características de desempeño reales variarán dependiendo de las configuraciones y condiciones de los clientes individuales. SAS no garantiza ni augura que todos los clientes lograrán resultados similares. Las únicas garantías aplicables a los productos y servicios de SAS son aquellas que se estipulan en las declaraciones de garantía explícitas en el contrato por escrito relativo a dichos productos y servicios. No se debe considerar que nada de lo aquí mencionado constituye una garantía adicional. Los clientes han compartido sus éxitos con SAS como parte de un intercambio contractual convenido o resumen de éxito de proyectos tras una implementación exitosa de software de SAS. Los nombres de marcas y productos son marcas comerciales de sus respectivas compañías.