ABOUT THE VENDOR
SAS provides software and services that enable customers to transform data from all areas of their
business into intelligence. SAS solutions help organizations make better, more informed decisions
and maximize customer, supplier, and organizational relationships. Solutions from SAS are used at
more than 37,000 business, government and university sites around the world. Customers include 98
of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 500, and 90% of the Fortune 500 overall.
ABOUT THE CUSTOMER
Eddie Bauer is a tri-channel specialty retailer offering men's and women's clothing, accessories,
and home furnishings for today's lifestyle. In its 80-year history, Eddie Bauer has evolved from a
single store to an international company with catalogs, more than 530 retail and outlet stores in
the U.S. and Canada, and a Web site. Through joint ventures and licensing agreements, Eddie Bauer
also markets its sportswear in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY
The SAS Solution for CRM helps companies attain a panoramic customer view. SAS spans the entire
decision-support process for managing customer relationships. You can collect data at all customer
contact points and turn that data into knowledge for understanding and anticipating customer
behavior, meeting customer needs, building more profitable customer relationships, and gaining a
holistic view of a customer's lifetime
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Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director
value.Eddie Bauer implemented SAS in order to better understand how to turn single-channel customers into multi-channel customers. SearchCRM spoke with Harry Egler, Eddie Bauer's divisional VP for market planning and CRM, about the project.
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SearchCRM: Did you have a CRM system before you implemented SAS?
Egler: No, we didn't have a CRM "system"; however, we did have CRM business processes in place.
SearchCRM: When did you decide to evaluate solutions like SAS?
Egler: We started in the early to mid 1990s. It stemmed from a vision by the CEO, who was championing the idea of speaking to the customer with a single voice. Based on that vision, our department did a lot of analyses -- which wasn't easy at the time because we didn't have the supporting systems in place to do them. We were able to start to see a business case develop which suggested that customers with multi-channel experience were worth more than customers with single-channel experience. When you can interact with your customer on a number of different planes, it gives you more opportunities to dialogue with them. And we see that customers on multiple channels buy two to three times as much as single-channel customers.
When we started to see that, the question in my mind was how to create more multi-channel customers. In order to do this, you have to be able to understand consumer behavior so you can put strategies in place that makes sense for those customer groups. SAS was a solution that's very robust and allows you to sift through mountains of data and convert it into information.
SearchCRM: Did you look at any other vendors?
Egler: We looked at a lot of other vendors, but a lot of the folks that we have today are fairly well-schooled in analyzing lots of data. They are very familiar with the power of SAS software and the broad range of functionality it offers. The solution set seemed fairly obvious to that group of people.
SearchCRM: How did the implementation go?
Egler: The implementation was fairly fast and easy. The database was constructed within a ten month time period. The biggest challenge was finding the myriad sources of feeding that database, because there was no single customer-centric repository. Data was scattered among many different repositories throughout the organization. What this project did was to pull it all together into a central repository. We decided that the 32 source systems that we have today that feed the database were probably the best choice so that we had a single harmonious update of customer activity that provided the best single view of the customer.
SearchCRM: How do you use the CRM solution in your day-to-day business?
Egler: Here's an example. Think about a customer who buys Eddie Bauer merchandise through a direct channel -- let's say through the Web or through a catalog. The customer gets the merchandise and realizes it wasn't quite the color she wanted, and she wants to return it. A couple of years ago, there was some internal resistance by our retail operations that says that every time a customer brings in an item and wants to exchange it in the store, you have to push a negative button on the cash register, and that's not good for the store.
The reality is that when we looked at the data behind the types of customers who were returning merchandise to the store, we saw that the value of these customers was incredibly high relative to the average customer. The reason they were returning merchandise to the stores was because they were buying a lot more merchandise than the average customer. Not only were they buying direct, they were also buying from the store. When you see the value of these customers, it becomes clear that when a customer returns something to a store, it's almost like they have a sign on their head that says, "I am one of your most valuable customers."
That's an example of how we use the system each and every day to help our operational folks and to help our marketing strategy move forward. As a result of that, we promote actively that one of our competitive advantages is that you can take our merchandise back to the store -- there's a physical location where you can return even items you bought through the Web or the catalog.
SearchCRM: How did the training go?
Egler: The training went fine. There are people within our group who are more well-schooled in the types of analytical tools we're using, and tend to use them more than others. That's the reason we're using a suite a tools, and making sure that folks who are not well-schooled in writing Boolean logic have tools that are Graphical User Interface. Folks who are more sophisticated in their ability to write logic can actually do more sophisticated types of analyses.
SearchCRM: When do you expect to see ROI?
Egler: What we look at is whether we were successful at getting more customers and whether we can get customers to shop across channels. And does the fact that they're multi-channel shoppers mean that they spend more money? If the answers to these questions ever go south, that would indicate that we're not getting ROI. But all the signs we're getting point to the fact that there is an ROI.
SearchCRM: If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?
Egler: We probably would have started smaller. I think that the immediate ability to interact with the data would have been a little easier, and we probably would have had an accelerated knowledge curve. And you can always add different levels of information for different functional needs. One of the biggest challenges is having folks navigate a very large data mart.
Linda Formichelli's writing appeared this year in Woman's Day, Wired, Writer's Digest, Family Circle, Psychology Today. Contact her at linda-eric@lserv.com, or check out her Web site http://www.twowriters.net
This was first published in October 2001
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