CRM with Attitude

New initiative aims to capture customers attitudes, awareness and habits

Chicago  June 26, 2001  Analytical customer relationship management (CRM) and data warehousing firm SAS Institute and MarketTools, a provider of Web-based market research systems and services, today announced a joint technology and business alliance. Under the terms of the agreement, SAS and MarketTools will execute a sales and marketing pact to provide preferred CRM solutions to targeted industries. The technology alliance enables SAS users to leverage MarketTools' zTelligence survey data to enhance customer relationship programs.

The alliance will help consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail and other industries achieve a greater return on investment from CRM technology by providing them with the ability to capture customer survey data (including attitudes, awareness and preferences) and integrate it with their transactional data. By enriching customer profiles with both attitudinal and behavioral information a company will gain a clear picture of customers' preferences and be able to better predict future behavior.

"In general, Web-based survey tools seem a natural next step in expanding the number of data sources that feed into a closed-loop CRM system. What better source than actually asking the consumer?" said Dan Vesset, an industry analyst with IDC. "Adding MarketTools' Web-based survey data to SAS' analytical CRM technology will drive more sophisticated customer segmentation and profiling, enabling improved marketing efforts. This alliance will certainly add value to customers in the CPG, retail and other industries."

"For companies today, analyzing data on customer behavior, detecting patterns, and predicting future actions are at the heart of their CRM efforts," said Paul Bachteal, SAS' global director of platform partners for business development and channel operations. "The advent of Web-based market research adds an important and largely untapped source of data on customer attitudes and preferences. Through this alliance, SAS' analytical CRM software will be applied to the market research data captured by MarketTools' zTelligence, to help companies improve the effectiveness of their marketing strategy and achieve intelligent and profitable customer relationships."

Since customer attitudes drive behavior, adding attitudinal data from Web-based surveys to behavioral customer data will help companies achieve a more comprehensive understanding of their customers. This will enable companies to intelligently measure and predict customer profitability, lifetime value, propensity to buy, receptiveness to cross-selling and up-selling offers, and customer attrition.

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