Retail

Focus of the presentation from Russ Cobb was Banking, Insurance, Retail and Government. Banking first. Lots of releases this year primarily around Enterprise Risk Management, Governance Risk Compliance, Customer intelligence, fraud and financial crime solutions. Key customer issues for SAS in banking: Customer Growth How do you identify, grow and manage your most profitable customers. [...]

Carl Farrell came up to talk about sales enablement and execution. 2010 was an interesting year in the Americas as the recovery was very inconsistent between countries in the Americas and across verticals. Strong growth in First Year Fees – 21% in US, 15% in Canada and 56% nearly in Latin America (with the Southern [...]

I am attending the SAS analyst day this week – SAS Inside Intelligence. Jim Goodnight kicked off the SAS analyst event. Numbers look good for a tough economy – 5.2% worldwide growth in US Dollars or 6.7% without currency fluctuation. Latin America, Canada and Asia Pacific were all very strong but regions were good across [...]

I saw this interesting McKinsey piece recently – Rediscovering the art of selling – McKinsey Quarterly – Retail & Consumer Goods – Strategy & Analysis – and I was struck by the value of analytics in this context. What retailers really need to do, according to McKinsey, is focus on hiring sales people with personality, [...]

Runa was founded a couple of years ago to solve the problem of very low conversion rates on most e-commerce websites. Companies spend lots of money driving people to their websites but only 2-3% convert to buyers. One of the biggest reasons for this is shopping cart abandonment – people put goods in their cart [...]

Justin Honaman from Coca Cola presented on their use of Teradata in their customer intelligence program.  Coca Cola has a huge range of products, in many sizes, as well as dozens of bottlers and distribution partners. The 72 bottlers are limited to specific geographies, adding a layer of complexity to their business. Justin’s group, Customer [...]

National Australia Bank group (a 15 year Teradata customer) presented on their use of Teradata for multi-channel marketing. NAB has 10.9M customers worldwide and about 38,000 staff. Brock Lynch, from the marketing group within the retail bank, gave an overview of their analytical CRM approach. NAB sees its analytical CRM assets as: Complete customer data [...]

Guest intelligence is something Target use to drive marketing and merchandising decisions. Target, of course, is a large US retailer that does business in 49 states and has a major web presence. Target has guest data from panel surveys,  store surveys and operational data and regards these all as valid sources of guest data, without [...]

Meri Gruber had an interesting post on her Competing on Execution blog this week – Zappos: Make Me Happier with Business Analytics – that prompted me to want to add my own thoughts. She says: Why is Zappos only offering me help from other customers, when they are sitting on a wealth of order (and [...]

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork I recently got the survey results from the annual data mining survey that Karl Rexer of Rexer Analytics runs. You can get the summary here or the full results from Karl but here are my thoughts: Data mining is everywhere. The most cited areas are CRM / Marketing and Financial Services with [...]

Optimization is a mathematical process for finding the best decision for a given business problem – usually highest profit, lowest cost given a set of constraints. Involve applying an algorithm to data, decision variables, constraints and an objective function. In financial services and insurance optimization is still fairly new (unlike, say, supply chain) but the [...]

Final Predictive Analytics World presentation for me – Walmart Financial Services and Mu Sigma talking about marketing mix modeling. Walmart Financial Services focuses on the unbanked or under-banked. Specific services like money transfers, check cashing can be quite high volume in some locations and some 1,000 locations have branded MoneyCenters. Mu Sigma is an Indian [...]

I got a briefing from Quantivo recently. This is a company focused on behavioral analytics – uncovering patterns within the mountains of customer data that companies have – web analytics and point of sale data for instance. They help companies find these patterns, find the insight that they are not seeing with their current tools, [...]

Alison Bolen posted a nice list of analytic truths, or perhaps myths, on the SAS blog today and asked what people thought. I was, of course, unable to resist: To make analytics successful, the CEO has to have a personal interest in it. MYTH While it is true that the only companies I see who [...]

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork I am at the Premier Business Leadership Series, SAS/BetterManagement.com’s event, and I got to attend a great panel on Analytics in the Executive Suite. Barbara Pindar of Aeropostale, Eric Webster of State Farm Insurance, Cameron Davies of Disney and Keith Collins of SAS made up the panel. Each panelist gave a quick introduction: [...]

I am spending some time as a guest of SAS this week and we got started today with Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. He began by describing SAS Institute’s 33 years of continuous revenue growth as well as similarly growing reinvestment in R&D. SAS has not laid anyone off this year, for which kudos, and [...]

It’s been a while since I have used Lands End but just recently I needed to order some logo wear for my son’s school and they used Lands End as the supplier for this. I logged on, used the “find your school” option and found the code for my son’s school. The website then remembered [...]

Some time ago I saw this interesting little post –Recommendation Engine Secrets We Don’t Want You to Know: It’s not as Complicated as We’d Have You Think – that made the point that: Most recommendation engines use one of a handful of methods that are well understood And they are correct, of course. Recommendation engines [...]

Eric Arnum, editor of Warranty Week, gave an overview of the industry as a whole. Clearly the recession is taking its toll. Starting with new home builders it has spread to RV makers, auto makers, various retailers, GE and others. Warranty is important in many of these company’s challenges and some, like Hyundai, are trying [...]