New Customer Analytics Launch from SAS Announced

SAS (News - Alert) has announced the global launch of SAS for Customer Experience Analytics.

 

Debuted in the U.K. in February 2007, this addition to SAS' comprehensive Customer Intelligence suite is "the result of a global teaming agreement with Speed-Trap," described by SAS officials as "a U.K.-based provider of software that uses Web 2.0 technology to deliver complete on-line customer insight."

 

The product captures real-time data from the Web channel and integrates it with data from other channels to provide "multi-channel customer intelligence," according to company officials.

 

"SAS for Customer Experience Analytics has enabled us to know where to focus our attention enabling us to give our customers the best possible service," said Stephen Lonergan, program manager, HSBC Global Transaction Banking.

 

SAS for Customer Experience Analytics was developed using Dynamic Collection technology from Speed-Trap. This data collection system has been built into SAS' existing Enterprise Intelligence Platform.

 

Customer experience analytics emphasizes insight on the customer by combining data about their Web behavior with data from other touch points, such as the call center or point-of-purchase history.

 

The idea is that applying analytics to this combined data can, among other things, identify customers that prefer to research online and purchase offline and determine which online campaigns were most successful in acquiring customers that turned out to be loyal and highly profitable.

 

It's also supposed to identify which products customers are researching online so an appropriate offer can be made.

 

Earlier this year SAS announced the acquisition of privately held Teragram (News - Alert), a vendor of natural language processing and advanced linguistic technology.

 

SAS officials said the acquisition would improve SAS's own text mining and analytical BI offerings, and "extend them to enterprise and mobile search."

 

"The addition of Teragram's domain expertise and NLP technology will change the landscape of the BI and analytics markets," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight.

 

Teragram, a 40-person firm headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was to be run as a SAS company. Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed. Teragram's NLP customer base includes CNN, Forbes.com, Sony, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, the World Bank and Yahoo!

 

"As the data explosion continues, companies need an intelligent way to make sense of it all, whether data is in structured databases or in the huge variety of unstructured sources," said Yves Schabes, President of Teragram.