Companies are increasingly looking to tie traditional CRM systems to analytical tools to retain and boost the value of customers, according to users at SAS Institute Inc.'s BetterManagement Live Worldwide Business Conference 2005 here this week.

Aegon Direct Marketing Services Inc., the Baltimore-based direct marketing arm of Aegon USA Inc., this week began a year-long rollout of SAS CRM and analytical tools that will replace four legacy CRM systems that run marketing campaigns at four locations.

Karen Klein, senior vice president of marketing services at the company. "Now we will have some indication of the percentage of [marketing campaign] overlap," Klein said. "This will give us more intelligence to who we are offering [product] to, how many times we are offering to them and across which business units." Aegon plans to install SAS's Customer Intelligence CRM software suite and combine it with already installed SAS analytical tools to create a marketing and business intelligence platform, she said.

According to Klein, a key piece of the CRM suite -- the Interaction Management business activity monitoring tool -- can detect trends in transactional data and include triggers to start a campaign if data shows a customer might leave the company.

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Source: ComputerWorldPrashanth RaiTag(s):CRM, Analytics