SAS® Real-Time Decision Manager Coordinates Marketing Communications Across All Channels

Business Wire, Sept 17, 2007

Inbound Marketing Presents Tremendous Opportunity to Increase Profitability and Enhance the Customer Experience

CARY, N.C. -- SAS, the leader in business intelligence, announced today SAS Real-Time Decision Manager to help marketers coordinate interactive marketing across multiple channels. The new solution in SAS' customer intelligence suite, which uses analytically driven decision logic to increase the effectiveness of every customer interaction, ships in December 2007.

Predictive analytics applied in real-time

Today's customers expect a personalized experience whether it's through the Web, call center or other customer touchpoints. They want to be sure that their needs are addressed and that they are treated as individuals.

SAS Real-Time Decision Manager is designed to provide the intelligence that drives this type of personalized experience. When SAS Real-Time Decision Manager receives a decision request from an operational system it combines all available customer data with SAS Analytics and business logic in real-time to determine the best response for the customer, such as:

* Make a recommendation on a customer's eligibility to receive a particular offer.

* Score a customer's propensity to buy a certain item.

* Calculate a customer's credit worthiness based on the latest transactional information.

For example, a customer calls a financial institution to check his account balance and inquire about the minimum balance necessary to avoid a penalty. Based on this new input and the customer's past behavior and transactional history, the decision flow determines that this customer has a high probability of leaving for a competitor. Other factors indicate that his profitability is above average and he shows great potential for future returns. Based on this, the decision flow returns a recommendation to make an offer that will increase the probability of retaining this customer. The call center representative is armed with the best possible information to act upon.

"According to Peppers & Rogers Group, as much as 50 percent of the customer decision-making process takes place in real time1," said Jeff Levitan, General Manager, SAS Customer Intelligence. "An analytical approach to making those decisions has been proven to drive far greater value than any other approach, the ability to do this in real-time at the point of contact will drive immediate business value."

Integrated with SAS([R] )Customer Intelligence Solutions

A key strength of SAS Real-Time Decision Manager is its ability to leverage the SAS Customer Intelligence suite, as well as the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform. An organization can gather and access information from virtually any system within the enterprise and store it in one central location, allowing inbound and outbound sales and marketing activities to be tightly coordinated. Sharing a common user interface and common customer information with several SAS solutions, this new addition to the SAS suite of enterprise marketing solutions will enable companies to optimize every customer interaction to improve revenue, growth, and retention.

Making marketing departments more independent

With SAS Real-Time Decision Manager, real-time decision criteria can be managed by marketers through an easy-to-use graphical interface rather than being hard-coded in a call center or Web-based system. Now, marketers can make necessary changes on their own, reacting and driving changes at the speed of business - not the speed of IT development cycles.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services. Customers at 43,000 sites use SAS software to improve performance through insight from data, resulting in faster, more accurate business decisions; more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; compliance with governmental regulations; research breakthroughs; and better products and processes. Only SAS offers leading data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW([R]). www.sas.com

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. [R] indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright [c] 2007 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

1 Peppers & Rogers Group, "Stop Random Acts of CRM," 2005