ORLANDO, FL — Outpost.com, an Internet retailer of consumer technology products, has implemented SAS e-Intelligence to identify customer purchase patterns and enhance customer interactions on the Web.
SAS Institute, Cary, NC, an e-intelligence and data warehousing vendor, announced the agreement yesterday at the 26th National Center for Database Marketing Conference and Exhibition.
SAS e-Intelligence pulls together and analyzes data from Web clickstreams, legacy systems and third-party providers of demographic data. It provides insight into customer behavior and enables Outpost.com's sales, marketing, business development and finance professionals to make decisions that improve customer service and profitability.
After just 10 months, company officials say the return on investment is already significant.
“Outpost.com's goal is to be the first pure-play dot-com to reach profitability — and SAS is our value-added partner to help us make the right decisions,” said Katherine Vick, president of Outpost.com. “SAS e-Intelligence scales, supports multiple platforms, and integrates online and offline data to quickly perform even the most sophisticated analysis and deliver insights to our decision-makers when they need it.”
Outpost.com determined that SAS e-Intelligence was the best solution to integrate and add intelligence to data from all its customer and supplier channels. Bringing together information from the Internet, extranets, call centers, e-mail and campaign management systems creates a holistic view of both customers and suppliers to support faster, better decisions, the company said.
Vick said Outpost.com uses SAS to better understand a variety of complex issues that require decisions. For example, the company used SAS e-Intelligence to assess the ROI of radio, TV and print advertising. When results showed that online advertising provided the company's most significant payback, executives leveraged that information in media-purchase decisions, cutting costs and improving advertising effectiveness.
In addition, SAS e-Intelligence allows Outpost.com to segment customers according to how recently they made a purchase, how frequently they buy and how much they usually spend. This knowledge helps the company to acquire and retain valued customers, which is translating directly into higher revenues and greater profitability. Marketers use these results to optimize cross-selling and upselling opportunities and to streamline the shopper's online experience.
“We can't wait days or even hours for reports if we are to stay on top of our customers' needs,” Vick said. “SAS e-Intelligence has [proved] the ability to produce some pretty sophisticated analytic work in a very short period of time.”
