British Gas brings in SAS analytics

British Gas is beefing up its direct marketing operation by implementing two analytics packages from SAS as part of plans to dig deeper into its customer data.
The company, which spends upwards of £40m a year on direct mail and sends nearly 100 million mailshots, will use the software to draw on its databases of customer interactions and enable a greater degree of targeting for campaigns.
Insight from data gathered will also help shape the overall marketing strategy – including the company’s multi-million pound call centre operation – as the energy giant seeks to become a customer-centric organisation, through better understanding of customers and improving customer loyalty. OgilvyOne handles the firm’s direct marketing account, with CHI & Partners running the ad business and Waste Creative on digital.
British Gas head of campaign decisioning Steve Thomas said: “We’re looking to improve the response rate to campaigns by using analytics to tailor our offer to each individual customer.
“Ours is a highly competitive market, and we want to better understand our customers through improved analytics. SAS helps us enhance our marketing campaigns and shape the British Gas goal of becoming a customer-centric organisation. All this can be managed through our relationship with SAS who provide us with a service that perfectly complements our existing processes.”
SAS UK & Ireland executive director Mike Pell added: “Meeting customer needs is a major challenge for energy providers and one of the reasons is the lack of insight to deliver what customers really want… It’s crucial that companies like British Gas are able to collect and analyse consumer data to give them the power to know more about customer preferences.”

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