SAS transforms traditional customer data platform capabilities

Marketers face many challenges streamlining customer data that traditional customer data platforms (CDPs) and marketing clouds alleviate. However, CDPs and marketing clouds have associated challenges, the biggest of which is the need to “lift and shift” all data into the CDP or marketing cloud. A new enhancement to SAS® Customer Intelligence 360 provides marketers with full access to the cloud data source, avoiding unnecessary, expensive and risky data movement.

The new enhancement speeds time-to-market for customer engagement and data activation from disparate sources with simplicity and control.

“The most innovative brands in today’s fast-paced digital world are focusing on improving the speed of data collection and analysis in order to enable faster, more effective data-driven decisions,” said Gerry Murray, Research Director, Enterprise Marketing Technology analyst at IDC. “Many brands find the cost and complexity of supporting data-driven decisioning at enterprise scale to be exorbitant due to the data movement and compute costs. Today, SAS is obviating the need for massive data movements and providing more efficient compute algorithms. Not having to move massive datasets into a CDP or marketing cloud results in lower cost, stronger privacy controls; and faster, more effective decisioning, which accelerates revenue.”

Key new capabilities of SAS Customer Intelligence 360:

Simplicity

·       A simple and intuitive user interface helps marketers easily define audiences and associated customer attributes, and move these into SAS Customer Intelligence 360 to start personalizing and acting on the data – all without IT help. No SQL or sophisticated analytical skills required.

·       Seamless consolidation and activation of first party data sources ensures that the data used in all audience communication is the very latest available, which improves marketing effectiveness and enhances outcomes.

Speed

·       Time-to-market for journey creation is significantly shortened because there is no need to engage IT to select and move the data from cloud-based data sources into SAS Customer Intelligence 360. By activating data from cloud-based data sources directly inside SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and taking advantage of the embedded customer data platform capabilities, marketers can quickly and efficiently create the differentiating experiences their customers expect.

·       Digital data collected by SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is streamed into the cloud-based data source in real-time where it can be integrated with existing customer data to enable real-time analysis, visualization, and consumption for the marketing department and beyond. This data includes granular contextualized customer-level information on user behavior from first-party digital properties – pages, screens, field interactions, and user defined digital events – along with results of the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 identity resolution, including linking of known and anonymous identities and synchronizing of online and off-line data.

Control

·       Unlike traditional CDPs, there is no need to “lift and shift” all the data into a marketing cloud or CDP to use it. Marketers pull only the data they want to activate when they want to activate it. This helps companies to capitalize on their existing data infrastructures and save on data-movement costs.

·       Privacy and compliance receive a strong boost through the ability to control the movement of personal identifiable information –bringing only the data needed for personalization into SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and keeping it there only as long as needed to complete the personalization and activation.

“Marketers today face an incredibly complex set of challenges – a burgeoning MarTech environment, strong demand from customers for relevant and timely communications, and a growing set of privacy regulations,” said Mike Blanchard, Vice President of SAS Customer Intelligence. “SAS’ objective is to reduce complexity while still helping marketers provide the great experiences their customers expect. This new enhancement to SAS Customer Intelligence 360 provides direct cloud data integrations and powerful new audience targeting and management capabilities to help marketers effectively define and manage audiences, simplify audience and segment creation, speed time-to-market for customer engagement, and facilitate privacy compliance while lowering data storage and movement costs. This complements the existing market-leading advanced segmentation capabilities that SAS provides.”