Staying ahead of retail trends

Sejung analyzes customer behavior and predicts their needs - giving them a reason to come back

In South Korea, the retail market is competitive and fast-moving. To stay ahead of the pack, Sejung uses SAS^® Marketing Automation to keep on top of the latest trends and to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty – in part by cutting reporting time from 15 hours to 40 minutes.

With more than 3.1 million customers, South Korean retailer Sejung – with brands such as Indian Homme, Anthem, Olivia Lauren and Tremolo – was unable to quickly and accurately manage and analyze its customer data to remain competitive in the fast-moving retail market. To increase customer insight and improve reporting, Sejung uses SAS^®. As a result, it better understands its customers and is expanding its business footprint.

Critical reporting

According to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Team Leader Seung-Bum Lim, Sejung's previous CRM system took too long to create reports and impeded the retailer's ability to respond quickly to market trend changes. Since implementing SAS, the time to generate critical marketing reports has been cut from 15 hours to 40 minutes.

"By the time business issues could be analyzed, they had already changed," says Lim. "And other business units had a poor understanding of the data that was being produced and had to rely heavily on the CRM team to interpret results. This led to decreased job satisfaction amongst CRM staff because they were spending too much time creating reports, rather than analyzing the data."

SAS, he adds, transformed the way Sejung creates reports and uses data. With automated report creation, the process has been significantly simplified, which has freed up valuable staff resources and increased productivity. As well, the sales force is able to generate custom reports in the field, and data required for advanced analytics is made available online.

A first for the industry

Sejung can now perform robust customer segmentation, predictive analytics and optimization. Customers are now segmented by brand, store, preferred products and purchase time. Lim says segmentation by store is a first for the South Korean distribution industry, with store segments and retail strategies based on the similarity of logistical operations and the customer management performance of agents.

"It used to take 15 hours to generate data for segmentation," explains Lim. "The process was a burden and consumed computing resources. Now the data is prepared in 40 minutes."

Sejung uses analytics for a variety of predictive models that analyze such things as inactivity and churn, weekly and monthly sales, and changes related to the business. Analytics is also applied to optimize and target the right customers with the right marketing offers, and help Sejung decide on whether to continue running certain campaigns by monitoring them in real time.

Sejung will also use SAS to enhance the way it manages marketing campaigns to implement increasingly differentiated marketing strategies.