Ohio Department of Natural Resources Talks CRM

When the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) first tried its hand at customer relationship management (CRM), it licensed SAS to analyze a database of 700,000 anglers and developed a marketing campaign that helped improve sales of state fishing licenses for the first time in 14 years. It was, by all accounts, a successful endeavor that increased revenue by more than $500,000.

But to Ken Fritz, the agency’s deputy CIO, the lessons learned were even more important than the immediate financial gains. He recently sat down with sascom to discuss those benefits.

sas.com: What were the initial business pains that drove you to implement a business intelligence (BI) solution?

Fritz: The original impetus to build an intelligence architecture grew from a local problem in one programmatic unit. We were witnessing a sustained drop in fishing license sales from 1998 to the present. That was a serious problem, because it’s a revenue stream that helps the Fish & Wildlife unit meet its mission.

sas.com: What did you learn from that original foray into customer relationship management?

Fritz: We immediately saw real opportunities for reducing churn and retaining customers. We found that we could predict pretty well what people were going to do, and one of our first campaigns showed we could intervene to alter their behavior. But more importantly, this project revealed customer insights that no one had suspected. We gained insights about our customers that highlighted a shared community of boaters, hikers, campers and outdoor enthusiasts. In the long run, this initiative has helped us develop an organizational structure for business intelligence. We’ve received executive buy-in and funds to invest in the training and tools needed to build a complete business intelligence architecture.

sas.com: What does that architecture include?

Fritz: We’ve built our foundation on the five components of the SAS Intelligence Value Chain: planning, ETL, data storage, reporting and advanced analytics. The core of that, for us, is ETL – extracting, cleaning and loading operational data, then storing it with SAS. Our entire warehouse is in SAS. We also use SAS for advanced analytics – SAS Enterprise Miner for data mining and advanced statistical reporting for the power users. Our intelligence architecture allows us to build a consolidated view of our customers across multiple divisions within the agency.

sas.com: What types of information are you analyzing?

Fritz: Our data warehouse takes point-of-sale [POS] information and links it to other information sources like demographic information and geographic referencing data to target and profile our customers. The POS data comes from hunting and fishing licenses, watercraft renewals and other types of revenue-enhancing transactions. We’re continuing to grab as much information as we can. There’s currently an effort to encourage online camping reservations in Ohio, and we’re just beginning to grab that information.

sas.com: What are your current goals, and what strategies do you use to meet your objectives?

Fritz: My role is to promote and develop business intelligence and customer relationship management within the agency. My ultimate goal is to make us a better organization so we can understand our customers better and provide the services they want. But it still comes down to making the value proposition in dollars and cents to department managers early on. Even though we’re a government agency, that’s the only way to get everyone to adopt early.

sas.com: What other techniques have you used to increase the use of BI throughout the agency?

Fritz: The enterprise reporting tool has helped everyone see the benefits of BI. With Web-based reporting, we can put business intelligence on everyone’s desktop, which immediately creates interest in systems that we set up and launches our projects further into the organization. At ODNR, SAS brings BI to the masses and makes this a true enterprise solution. We have three tactical business intelligence applications: an HR reporting tool, an IT management solution and a complete platform for CRM. Most of this growth occurred in less than a year, and the BI architecture really facilitated that growth.

sas.com: What types of changes have you witnessed at ODNR?

Fritz: The organizational influences from these applications are demonstrated by growth indicators throughout the agency. Historically, subject-matter experts relied on gut feelings and experience because they had to. They did not have data that was up-to-date. Now information is more accurate and access to information leads to action, so their decisions are being made, more and more, based on data.

sas.com: What are your goals for the future?

Fritz: Budget constraints will continue to be a constant issue for government agencies in the future, and BI is the best way to make decisions for resource allocation. Currently, Ohio is involved in an ERP [enterprise resource planning] implementation that will put more than 200 state agencies on the same system for HR, budgeting, capital improvements and more. One of my goals is to support collaboration among the different state agencies. I’m really trying to leverage what we’ve done here to get more people involved in data warehousing and business intelligence, so we can begin to share our expertise with other agencies and they can share what they have done as well.