╨╧рб▒с>■  .0■   -                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                ье┴Y ┐нbjbjєWєW %(С=С=н      ]▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ЁЁЁЁЁ №ЁС·$$$$$$$$VXXXXXX$ЛЇ v|▄$$$$$|─▄▄$$$───$N▄$▄$VЁЁ▄▄▄▄$V─Т─V▄▄V$ hш┐0¤┐ЁЁrRV eWeek July 31, 2000 http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2609137,00.html PREDICTING USER BEHAVIOR --Dell, SAS join to monitor site visitors' actions-- By Dennis Callaghan You'd think a company that does $40 million a day in online sales would have the Web figured out by now. In fact, few companies have been more successful in forming one-to-one online relationships with customers than direct PC vendor Dell Computer Corp. But the Round Rock, Texas, company is not content to rest on its laurels. Instead, it has licensed the e-Intelligence suite of business intelligence products and services from SAS Institute Inc., of Cary, N.C., and will work with SAS to have an e-Intelligence system in production by the end of the year. Dell hopes to gain new insight into customer behavior so that it can optimize content and navigation on its site, ultimately making those customer interactions even more profitable. The company will deploy the software first to its home and small-business customer segment. e-Intelligence includes a range of SAS software and services that pull together and analyze data from Web clickstreams and legacy systems as well as demographic data from third-party providers. In Dell's case, it will analyze Web log file data along with other sources such as call center and transactional data. According to Abhay Mehta, director of Dell Online, that $40 million-per-day figure represents half of Dell's total revenues. Meanwhile, the Dell.com site draws 15 million visitors a month worldwide. All of those site visits and purchases generate a wealth of customer data that the company is trying to take better advantage of, Mehta said. "It's very important for us to understand the customer behind all those visits," he said. "At Dell, we've always prided ourselves on the direct model, and this initiative is a very natural extension of that direct model. We want to better understand our customers so we can provide the best possible personalized experience for them on Dell.com." Not surprisingly, Dell already does a fair amount of personalization, based on solutions developed in-house. But those home-grown solutions lack the robust analytics that SAS offers, Mehta said. "SAS' analytical capabilities allow us to take the next step in improving our understanding of the customer," he said. SAS will help Dell in four areas: delivering quality e-metrics, such as conversion rates; hypothesis testing-that is, providing better insights into site traffic to validate marketers' hypotheses; gaining a better understanding of customer behavior on the site, such as paths taken, to improve site content and navigation; and profiling customers by behavior into marketing segments, for improved campaign execution. "We'll have several systems in place, integrated together, to give us a 360-degree view of the customer," Mehta said. "We're fine-tuning our direct model, so we can increase that $40 million a day by as much as possible." Now that virtually every PC vendor has a direct sales model via the Web-unlike in 1996, when Dell first started selling online with its Premier Pages-the competition is more intense than ever, even as PC sales level off. "We constantly live in that fear [of competition]," Mehta said. "That's what motivates us to move as fast as we do." The e-Intelligence system will be deployed first for Dell's home and small-business customers (companies with less than 400 employees). Mehta stressed that Dell doesn't want to go too far in its personalization efforts. "Doing too much personalization is as bad as doing too little," he said. "Once the customer buys something from us, that's when it warrants a one-to-one relationship." But like most personalization systems, the site will be able to personalize content even for anonymous visitors, based on their behavior at the site-what areas they visit and what products they seem most interested in. Most personalization systems on the market today weren't good enough for Dell. Packaged personalization solutions simply didn't scale to the customer volumes that Dell deals with. "There was nothing out there that would help with the volume we have," Mehta said. "Scalability, reliability and availability were the three most important things we were looking for." He said Dell already had a relationship with SAS in providing analytics for its offline business and knew of SAS' analytical capabilities, so it made sense to extend that relationship online. Dell's choice of SAS for Web analytics and personalization didn't surprise Aberdeen Group Inc. analyst Bob Moran. "There's been a number of tools that have emerged from the labs in the early stages of e-business, and their developers and marketers have made a lot of noise surrounding them, describing as 'best practices' what may have only been new practices," said Moran, in Boston. "The noise of the new players tends to drown out the value proposition of the more mature suppliers who have already cut their teeth on scalability and can deliver what has been able to work all along." Moran said it shouldn't surprise anyone that SAS was able to provide "intricate analytics" in a high-volume environment such as Dell's. "They're a recognized leader in data warehousing by any measure," he said. "They're a natural place to look for a high-end implementation." Other companies that have turned to SAS e-Intelligence for high-end data warehousing implementations include used-car Web site AutoTrader.com LLC, music club BMG Direct and Internet exchange service provider @TheMoment Inc. 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