Opinions may vary on just how much personalization consumers want in their marketing messages from companies, but delivering it has been the goal of many software vendors. SAS has extended its Customer Intelligence product line with a new SaaS offering, Customer Intelligence 360. Here are the key details from its announcement this week:
Customer expectations for personalized interactions are skyrocketing, but digital silos hinder effective and agile campaigns. How can companies support customer experiences that are relevant and targeted when they can’t effectively unite digital customer data with offline data such as in-store transactions?
Customer Intelligence 360 ... serves as a new digital marketing hub that unites data from all channels to help users make smarter decisions and improve their customers’ experience.
Fragmented data is an issue plaguing marketers. When email data is housed in one marketing solution, but web behavior interactions are managed in another, for example, marketers lack a complete customer view. And this has led them to lack confidence in their digital marketing capabilities.
The service is launching with two core modules: 360 Discover, which crunches customer behavior data from web and mobile sources; and 360 Engage, to "create, orchestrate, and optimize digital customer journeys," SAS says.
"The goal with Discover is to capture insights on how customers are behaving on web, mobile, (soon) email and social, and (eventually) IoT channels," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "Engage is about leveraging SAS advanced decision engines to deliver better, more relevant content back into these channels."
The Bottom Line
Customer Intelligence 360 is not a replacement or retread of SAS' on-premises Customer Intelligence, Henschen says. "Rather, it’s a complement to that product, focusing on digital marketing channels, staring with Web sites and mobile apps and, soon SAS promises, modules will be added for email and social. As for the promise of 'uniting data from all channels,' that presumes that the customer is also using SAS CI on-premises or hosted."
Overall, SAS is not trying to build a complete marketing cloud, Henschen adds. Rather, SAS sees the completion as ranging from SaaS vendors like Marketo and Oracle Eloqua to self-service analytics vendors like Alteryx, and to Web analytics players like Adobe and CRM vendors such as Salesforce and Microsoft.
"Many of these competitors focus exclusively on digital channels," Henschen says. "SAS’ differentiator is the connection to its existing CI product and its knowledge of behaviors across non-digital channels. Competitors can connect digital and physical world behaviors as well, but this will attractive to SAS customers who tend to appreciate the vendor’s comprehensive offerings."
However, as with SAS' other major announcement this week—a new cloud architecture called Viya—it remains to be seen whether CI360 will attract new business outside the SAS installed base.
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