As the open-source community has been taking the technology world by storm, especially in the big data space, large corporations such as SAS, IBM, and Oracle have been working to embrace this new, quickly evolving ecosystem to continue to foster innovation and to remain competitive. For example, SAS, IBM, and others have aligned with the Open Data Platform initiative and are continuing to build out Hadoop and Spark solutions. And, Oracle has partnered with Cloudera to create the Big Data Appliance. This movement challenges companies that are consuming these products to select the right products and support partners. The hybrid approach using all tools available seems to be the methodology chosen by most successful companies. West Corporation, an Omaha-based provider of technology-enabled communication solutions, is no exception. West has been working with SAS for 10 years in the ETL, BI, and advanced analytics space, and West began its Hadoop journey a year ago. This paper focuses on how West data teams use both technologies to improve customer experience in the interactive voice response (IVR) system by storing massive semi-structure call logs in HDFS and by building models that predict a caller s intent to route the caller more efficiently and to reduce customer effort using familiar SAS code and the very user friendly SAS^® Enterprise Miner .

Customer churn is an important area of concern that affects not just the growth of your company, but also the profit. Conventional survival analysis can provide a customer's likelihood to churn in the near term, but it does not take into account the lifetime value of the higher-risk churn customers you are trying to retain. Not all customers are equally important to your company. Recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) analysis can help companies identify customers that are most important and most likely to respond to a retention offer. In this paper, we use the IML and PHREG procedures to combine the RFM analysis and survival analysis in order to determine the optimal number of higher-risk and higher-value customers to retain.

It takes months to find a customer and only seconds to lose one Unknown. Though the Business-to-Business (B2B) churn problem might not be as common as Business-to-Consumer (B2C) churn, it has become crucial for companies to address this effectively as well. Using statistical methods to predict churn is the first step in the process of retaining customers, which also includes model evaluation, prescriptive analytics (including outreach optimization), and performance reporting. Providing visibility into model and treatment performance enables the Data and Ops teams to tune models and adjust treatment strategy. West Corporation's Center for Data Science (CDS) has partnered with one of the lines of businesses in order to measure and prevent B2B customer churn. CDS has coupled firmographic and demographic data with internal CRM and past outreach data to build a Propensity to Churn model using SAS^®. CDS has provided the churn model output to an internal Client Success Team (CST), who focuses on high-risk/high-value customers in order to understand and provide resolution to any potential concerns that might be expressed by such customers. Furthermore, CDS automated weekly performance reporting using SAS and Microsoft Excel that not only focuses on model statistics, but also on CST actions and impact. This paper focuses on all of the steps involved in the churn-prevention process, including building and reviewing the model, treatment design and implementation, as well as performance reporting.

For all business analytics projects big or small, the results are used to support business or managerial decision-making processes, and many of them eventually lead to business actions. However, executives or decision makers are often confused and feel uninformed about contents when presented with complicated analytics steps, especially when multi-processes or environments are involved. After many years of research and experiment, a web reporting framework based on SAS^® Stored Processes was developed to smooth the communication between data analysts, researches, and business decision makers. This web reporting framework uses a storytelling style to present essential analytical steps to audiences, with dynamic HTML5 content and drill-down and drill-through functions in text, graph, table, and dashboard formats. No special skills other than SAS^® programming are needed for implementing a new report. The model-view-controller (MVC) structure in this framework significantly reduced the time needed for developing high-end web reports for audiences not familiar with SAS. Additionally, the report contents can be used to feed to tablet or smartphone users. A business analytical example is demonstrated during this session. By using this web reporting framework based on SAS Stored Processes, many existing SAS results can be delivered more effectively and persuasively on a SAS^® Enterprise BI platform.

Join this breakout session hosted by the Customer Value Management team from Saudi Telecommunications Company to understand the journey we took with SAS^® to evolve from simple below-the-line campaign communication to advanced customer value management (CVM). Learn how the team leveraged SAS tools ranging from SAS^® Enterprise Miner to SAS^® Customer Intelligence Suite in order to gain a deeper understanding of customers and move toward targeting customers with the right offer at the right time through the right channel.

Creating an environment that enables and empowers self-service and agile analytic capabilities requires a tremendous amount of working together and extensive agreements between IT and the business. Business and IT users are struggling to know what version of the data is valid, where they should get the data from, and how to combine and aggregate all the data sources to apply analytics and deliver results in a timely manner. All the while, IT is struggling to supply the business with more and more data that is becoming available through many different data sources such as the Internet, sensors, the Internet of Things, and others. In addition, once they start trying to join and aggregate all the different types of data, the manual coding can be very complicated and tedious, can demand extraneous resources and processing, and can negatively impact the overhead on the system. If IT enables agile analytics in a data lab, it can alleviate many of these issues, increase productivity, and deliver an effective self-service environment for all users. This self-service environment using SAS^® analytics in Teradata has decreased the time required to prepare the data and develop the statistical data model, and delivered faster results in minutes compared to days or even weeks. This session discusses how you can enable agile analytics in a data lab, leverage SAS analytics in Teradata to increase performance, and learn how hundreds of organizations have adopted this concept to deliver self-service capabilities in a streamlined process.

Do you need to add annotations to your graphs? Do you need to specify your own colors on the graph? Would you like to add Unicode characters to your graph, or would you like to create templates that can also be used by non-programmers to produce the required figures? Great, then this topic is for you! In this hands-on workshop, you are guided through the more advanced features of the GTL procedure. There are also fun and challenging SAS^® graphics exercises to enable you to more easily retain what you have learned.

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In this technology-driven era, multi-channel communication has become a pivotal part of an effective customer care strategy for companies. Old ways of delivering customer service are no longer adequate. To survive a tough competitive market and retain current customer base, companies are spending heavily to serve customers in the manner in which they wish to be served. West Corporation helps their clients in designing a strategy that would provide their customers with a connected inbound and outbound communication experience. This paper illustrates how the Data Science team at West Corporation has measured the effect of outbound short message service (SMS) notification in reducing inbound interactive voice response (IVR) call volume and improving customer satisfaction for a leading telecom services company. As part of a seamless experience, customers have the option of receiving outbound SMS notifications at several stages while traversing inside IVR. Notifications can involve successful payment and appointment confirmations, outage updates in the area, and an option of receiving text with details to reset Wi-Fi password and activate new devices. This study was performed on two groups of customers one whose members opted to receive notifications and one whose members did not opt in. Also, analysis was performed using SAS^® to understand repeat caller behaviors within both groups. The group that opted to receive SMS notifications were less likely to call back than those who did not opt in.

This paper describes an effective real-time contextual marketing system based on a successful case implemented in a private communication company in Chile. Implementing real-time cases is becoming a major challenge due to stronger competition, which generates an increase of churn and higher operational costs, among other issues. All of these can have an enormous effect on revenue and profit. A set of predictive machine learning models can help to improve response rates of outbound campaigns, but it s not enough to be more proactive in this business. Our real-time system for contextual marketing uses the two SAS^® solutions: SAS^® Event Stream Processing and SAS^® Real-Time Decision Manager, which are connected in cascade. In this configuration, SAS Event Stream Processing can read massive amounts of data from call detail records (CDRs) and antennas, and SAS Real-Time Decision Manager receives the resulting golden events, which trigger the right responses. Time elapsed from the detection of a golden event until a response is processed is approximately 5 seconds. Since implementing seven use cases of this real-time system, the results show an average augmentation in revenue of two million dollars in a testing period of four months, thus returning the investment in a short-term period. The implementation of this system has changed the way Telef nica Chile generates value from big data. Moreover, an outstanding, long-term working relationship between Telef nica Chile and SAS has been started.

When analyzing data with SAS^®, we often use the SAS DATA step and the SQL procedure to explore and manipulate data. Though they both are useful tools in SAS, many SAS users do not fully understand their differences, advantages, and disadvantages and thus have numerous unnecessary biased debates on them. Therefore, this paper illustrates and discusses these aspects with real work examples, which give SAS users deep insights into using them. Using the right tool for a given circumstance not only provides an easier and more convenient solution, it also saves time and work in programming, thus improving work efficiency. Furthermore, the illustrated methods and advanced programming skills can be used in a wide variety of data analysis and business analytics fields.

Every organization, from the most mature to a day-one start-up, needs to grow organically. A deep understanding of internal customer and operational data is the single biggest catalyst to develop and sustain the data. Advanced analytics and big data directly feed into this, and there are best practices that any organization (across the entire growth curve) can adopt to drive success. Analytics teams can be drivers of growth. But to be truly effective, key best practices need to be implemented. These practices include in-the-weeds details, like the approach to data hygiene, as well as strategic practices, like team structure and model governance. When executed poorly, business leadership and the analytics team are unable to communicate with each other they talk past each other and do not work together toward a common goal. When executed well, the analytics team is part of the business solution, aligned with the needs of business decision-makers, and drives the organization forward. Through our engagements, we have discovered best practices in three key areas. All three are critical to analytics team effectiveness. 1) Data Hygiene 2) Complex Statistical Modeling 3) Team Collaboration

Prince Niccolo Machiavelli said things on the order of, The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present. His utilitarian philosophy can be summed up by the phrase, The ends justify the means. As a personality trait, Machiavelianism is characterized by the drive to pursue one's own goals at the cost of others. In 1970, Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis created the MACH-IV test to assign a MACH score to an individual, using 20 Likert-scaled questions. The purpose of this study was to build a regression model that can be used to predict the MACH score of an individual using fewer factors. Such a model could be useful in screening processes where personality is considered, such as in job screening, offender profiling, or online dating. The research was conducted on a data set from an online personality test similar to the MACH-IV test. It was hypothesized that a statistically significant model exists that can predict an average MACH score for individuals with similar factors. This hypothesis was accepted.

Graphics are an excellent way to display results from multiple statistical analyses and get a visual message across to the correct audience. Scientific journals often have very precise requirements for graphs that are submitted with manuscripts. While authors often find themselves using tools other than SAS^® to create these graphs, the combination of the SGPLOT procedure and the Output Delivery System enables authors to create what they need in the same place as they conducted their analysis. This presentation focuses on two methods for creating a publication quality graphic in SAS^® 9.4 and provides solutions for some issues encountered when doing so.

Mediation analysis is a statistical technique for investigating the extent to which a mediating variable transmits the relation of an independent variable to a dependent variable. Because it is useful in many fields, there have been rapid developments in statistical mediation methods. The most cutting-edge statistical mediation analysis focuses on the causal interpretation of mediated effect estimates. Cause-and-effect inferences are particularly challenging in mediation analysis because of the difficulty of randomizing subjects to levels of the mediator (MacKinnon, 2008). The focus of this paper is how incorporating longitudinal measures of the mediating and outcome variables aides in the causal interpretation of mediated effects. This paper provides useful SAS^® tools for designing adequately powered studies to detect the mediated effect. Three SAS macros were developed using the powerful but easy-to-use REG, CALIS, and SURVEYSELECT procedures to do the following: (1) implement popular statistical models for estimating the mediated effect in the pretest-posttest control group design; (2) conduct a prospective power analysis for determining the required sample size for detecting the mediated effect; and (3) conduct a retrospective power analysis for studies that have already been conducted and a required sample to detect an observed effect is desired. We demonstrate the use of these three macros with an example.

Propensity to Buy models comprise one of the most widely used techniques in supporting business strategy for customer segmentation and targeting. Some of the key challenges every data scientist faces in building predictive models are the utilization of all known predictor variables, uncovering any unknown signals, and adjusting for latent variable errors. Often, the business demands inclusion of certain variables based on a previous understanding of process dynamics. To meet such client requirements, these inputs are forced into the model, resulting in either a complex model with too many inputs or a fragile model that might decay faster than expected. West Corporation's Center for Data Science (CDS) has found a work around to strike a balance between meeting client requirements and building a robust model by using clustering techniques. A leading telecom services provider uses West's SMS Outbound Notification Platform to notify their customers about an upcoming Pay-Per-View event. As part of the modeling process, the client has identified a few variables as key business drivers and CDS used those variables to build clusters, which were then used as inputs to the predictive model. In doing so, not only all the effects of the client-mandated variables were captured successfully, but this also helped to reduce the number of inputs to the model, making it parsimonious. This paper illustrates how West has used clustering in the data preparation process and built a robust model.

Every visualization tells a story. The effectiveness of showing data through visualization becomes clear as these visualizations will tell stories about differences in US mortality using the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (NLMS) data, using the Public-Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of 1.2 million cases and 122 thousand records of mortality. SAS^® Visual Analytics is a versatile and flexible tool that easily displays the simple effects of differences in mortality rates between age groups, genders, races, places of birth (native or foreign), education and income levels, and so on. Sophisticated analyses including logistical regression (with interactions), decision trees, and neural networks that are displayed in a clear, concise manner help describe more interesting relationships among variables that influence mortality. Some of the most compelling examples are: Males who live alone have a higher mortality rate than females. White men have higher rates of suicide than black men.

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Oi S.A. (Oi) is a pioneer in providing convergent services in Brazil. It currently has the greatest network capillarity and WiFi availability Brazil. The company offers fixed lines, mobile services, broadband, and cable TV. In order to improve service to over 70 million customers, The Customer Intelligence Department manages the data generated by 40,000 call center operators. The call center produces more than a hundred million records per month, and we use SAS^® Visual Analytics to collect, analyze, and distribute these results to the company. This new system changed the paradigm of data analysis in the company. SAS Visual Analytics is user-friendly and enabled the data analysis team to reduce IT time. Now it is possible to focus on business analysis. Oi started developing its SAS Visual Analytics project in June 2014. The test period lasted only 15 days and involved 10 people. The project became relevant to the company. It led us to the next step, in which 30 employees and 20 executives used the tool. During the last phase, we applied that to a larger scale with 300 users, including local managers, executives, and supervisors. The benefits brought by the fast implementation (two months) are many. We reduced the time it takes to produce reports by 80% and the time to complete business analysis by 40%.