SM-MCI to deepen customer engagement with SAS and big data

SM-MCI to deepen customer engagement with SAS and big data : SM Marketing Convergence Inc. will intensify its multichannel customer engagement using software from analytics leader SAS. An affiliate of SM Retail Group, one of the largest and most successful families of companies in the Philippines, SM-MCI is strengthening its loyalty program by creating an advanced customer decision hub based on SAS Analytics. Combining several SAS Customer Intelligence products, the customer decision hub helps SM-MCI deliver more relevant and timely offers, better-targeted promotions and high-quality service. The company will use improved customer insight to reach customers through the best channel, whether online, in-store, email or mobile message. Such precision and offer optimization is only possible through big data analytics.

The new hub will initially be used by SM-MCI’s marketing, promotions, loyalty and analytics teams to ensure consistent, personalized and in-context experiences at all touch points. “Our company seeks to go beyond mere marketing automation. This comprehensive analytics platform will transform our big data into remarkable experiences for all our customers, whether online or in the store,” said SM-MCI President and CEO Baldwin Golangco. “SM-MCI believes strongly that SAS Analytics, and in particular SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Customer Intelligence, are the keys to our success, producing insights to create the right offers and actions via the right channels based on each customer’s unique needs.”

SM-MCI loyalty program data exceeds 1 billion historical transactions and adds 200 million transactions each year from more than 500 stores.

“For over a decade, SM-MCI relied on its deep personal knowledge of customers to develop campaigns,” said Sonny Halili, Regional Director for the Pacific Region at SAS. “As the company expanded, SM-MCI recognized that an analytics-based approach was the only way to continue growing and serving its customers. Now with SAS Analytics, SM-MCI will enrich its knowledge of and relationship with those customers.”

With SAS, SM-MCI expects to:
Proactively drive innovative and targeted marketing campaigns to customers of SM Retail Partners with highly personalized and relevant offers based on customer profiles and insights. Shift from mass promotions to contextualized, micro-segmented offers, using traditional and digital marketing channels to deliver more relevant and effective offers to loyalty-program customers. Boost agility in all aspects of marketing campaigns – from the earliest stages of campaign creation to post-campaign measurement. Become the industry benchmark in retail loyalty.

SM-MCI will also use SAS Visual Analytics for pre-campaign profiling to identify the best campaign, target segments and post-campaign reporting to measure performance and ROI. SAS Customer Intelligence solutions use analytics to help organizations better understand their customers and develop targeted and effective marketing strategies to reach them. The SAS offerings use a decision-hub approach that combines:

• Insights gleaned from analyzing data about marketing, sales, service and other actions.
• Rules to manage policies, sequences and constraints across the business and recommend actions and channels to communicate with customers.
• Decision logic that incorporates unstructured interactions such as calls, email, text messages and social media posts to serve responses in real time or batch modes.
• Tracking and managing omnichannel customer engagement activities to ensure the most compelling customer experience and the best marketing ROI.