Teradata

Numerous business issues are encouraging cable companies to build a strong knowledge foundation and to use that knowledge to maximize profitability and maintain customer satisfaction. To compete, the industry must move quickly to capture data from new transaction sources and integrate that information with traditional business data. The business must move from a partial and disparate knowledge foundation to a consistent one that leverages the insight of regional and corporate perspectives.

The cable industry is on the move. New revenue streams from video on demand (VOD) and PVRs to computers and phone service, are forcing companies to find new and better ways to blend traditional services with digital products. The way cable companies must compete is changing as demand grows for home networks, streaming video, HDTV, VoIP, and other product and service innovations. This means more choice for consumers and more complex product and service offerings. How will the cable industry manage the complexity of its service and product offerings? How will the cable industry promote these offers to attract customers and increase wallet share? Where will the next competitive threat lie? How will the cable industry maintain its competitive advantage?

Cable companies have evolved through market penetration at a regional level. This has resulted in a fragmentation of information to support the needs of the business units. Information required by customer care, marketing, advertising sales, retail sales, B2B sales, and media is tightly aligned with each organization and business unit.

There is an opportunity to reduce cost and enhance decision support processes by consolidating the information required by numerous cable applications. Consolidation of subscriber information is a particularly attractive target as it is central to many business unit decisions.

The approach to consolidating the information needs of the cable industry is based on identifying an information model that satisfies the individual needs of each business unit while also providing corporate, divisional, and regional organizations with multiple views of the business. This abstract presents an approach to address this challenge by describing a data architecture that models the information needs of the cable industry and identifies the primary data sources to populate the information model.

The information needs of cable operators centers around the necessity to translate differing terminology and data representations – across subscribers and products – into a vehicle that provides a set of common terminology and intuitive access paths. Product offers and delivery vary by region and are volatile, so the vehicle must be flexible, adaptable, and extensible. This places a burden on the information delivery mechanism to define a distinct union that makes it easy to translate the various data representations into a meaningful and easily accessible arrangement. The types of data entities that are important to understand are:

• Subscriber
• Dwelling
• Offer
• Station
• Show and Show Schedule
• Region (Zone, DMA, Region, Division, Corporate)
• History (show, special event, channel changes)
• Network Component
• Advertiser
• Product
• Subscriber/Dwelling Relationship
• Product/Offer Availability
• Station Relationships
• Channel
• Special Events and Schedule
• Service (Digital, Analog, VOD)
• Network Component Relationship
• Advertisement

The cable industry is on the move. New revenue streams from video on demand (VOD) and PVRs to computers and phone service, are forcing companies to find new and better ways to blend traditional services with digital products. The way cable companies must compete is changing as demand grows for home networks, streaming video, HDTV, VoIP, and other product and service innovations. This means more choice for consumers and more complex product and service offerings. How will the cable industry manage the complexity of its service and product offerings? How will the cable industry promote these offers to attract customers and increase wallet share? Where will the next competitive threat lie? How will the cable industry maintain its competitive advantage?

Figure 1 illustrates the relationship of a subset of core subscriber management information entities for the purposes of describing an information-based approach. The full detail of entities, entity relationships, and attributes are described in the Teradata® Logical Data Model for the Cable Industry.

There are many important data sources that influence the decisions of cable operators. Much effort and cost is involved in acquiring, transforming, normalizing, storing, and providing access to this information.

Billing Systems

Cable operators face the challenge of collecting, organizing, and transforming information about their customers and products from a variety of sources. Billing systems are a primary source of subscriber and product information. Multiple billing systems and/or multiple instantiations of a billing system exist within each cable operator. To compound the complexity of sourcing subscriber data from billing systems, each instantiation may differ by region. One hundred or more regions may exist within each cable operator's national presence.

In addition to in-house developed billing systems, the following providers have a significant presence in the cable industry:

Convergys

The Integrated Communications Operations Management System (ICOMS) solution from Convergys Corporation is designed specifically for the convergent video, high-speed data, and telephony market. It supports cable television subscriber management, high-speed data, and wire line telephony requirements.

The Convergys WIZARD™ solution is designed for next-generation multimedia operators in global markets, allowing them to support voice, video, and data services. To address this rapidly evolving industry, WIZARD combines a customer service system with billing and rating capabilities. WIZARD Release 7.6 gives enables providers to manage their entire operation from a single, integrated solution.

CSG Systems

The CSG Integrated Customer Management System (CSG® ICMS) is an integrated customer care and billing solution for communications. CSG ICMS offers customers the choice of a multi-service solution that supports wireline, wireless, cable TV, data services, and internet services or a single line of business system.

DST

DST Innovis, Inc.® provides software solutions that focus on customer care, billing, CRM, and business process management. The DST Automated Work Distributor™ (AWD®) application interfaces with computer telephony integration (CTI) and other call center technologies to provide call center efficiencies. 

External Data

Third-party data that are procured from external sources is used to enhance the value of the corporate data assets. Typical external sources used for this purpose are:

• Demographics, household, and geographic information (e.g., Experian©, Acxiom,® D&B, SRC, USPS)
• Credit information (e.g., Experian, D&B)
• Affiliate sales and retail transactions (e.g., Best Buy™)
• Viewer behavior (e.g., Nielsen, TiVo®)
• ASP transactions (e.g., web logs, call center, advertising)
• Schedule (e.g., TV Guide, Pay Per View)

Internal Data

One of a corporation's most valuable assets is its internal data that are critical to gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. As a consolidation initiative progresses and evolves, the corporate information model becomes more widely populated with these internal assets, and the value of this shared asset increases. For example, there is often value in understanding the full view of a corporation that advertises on cable TV, purchases broadband services, and has a retail relationship via the internet or retail stores. Understanding the entire subscriber relationship will provide similar value.

Some of the candidate internal data sources are:

• Subscriber information
• Call Center (resources, contacts)
• Internal billing
• Network infrastructure
• Advertising inventory and transactions
• Advertiser information
• Web logs
• Viewer behavior
• Retail transactions

A business improvement opportunity diagram (Figure 2) illustrates how the information model and the technology enablers satisfy the business requirements of the cable operators. The practice of challenging the information model with diverse, cross-functional requirements ensures that the consolidation effort meets the needs of the corporation.

Business Need

The following narrative walks through a solution scenario associated with the business improvement opportunity diagram in Figure 2.

Accurate Account Data

Intelligence is created from the data. Normalized data and accurate intelligence come from good, accurate data … and vice versa. Data quality is imperative to the success of reaching the business benefit.

Process

Data quality is an on-going challenge. The initial attempt to normalize and clean the data is only the first step in achieving data quality. Business rules and processes must be put in place to iteratively improve data quality. Ownership, accountability, and measurement are the key components to reaching data quality.

Tools

Teradata Warehouse Miner is a tool used to quickly uncover data quality issues. It, combined with the data model as a roadmap, will provide most of the tools needed to improve data quality.

People

Full-time job roles dedicated to defining and executing the processes necessary to ensure data quality. Frequently, data quality is perceived to be an event rather than a never ending process. Perfect quality in data will never be achieved, but through measurement and accountability, data quality can always be improved and maintained.

Enabler Subset

Certain enablers must be in place to achieve business benefit.

Process

Disparate data from the regions must be combined and transformed such that analysis across regions is possible.

Tools

In addition to standard ETL tools, business rules and the cable data model will facilitate a consistent view of the multiple data regions. The data model needs to be deployed on a platform capable of storing and retrieving the detailed historical data.

People

Job functions dedicated to intelligence creation will need to be in place. The new processes and tools need to be exploited by human interaction. Hypothesis creation, testing, and measurement will create the intelligence needed to leverage trends across regions.

Business Benefit

To be able to uncover and act upon trends in other regions.

The following definitions are used to expand upon and clarify Figure 2. Each definition is matched to a part of the diagram by number. 

Business Needs Definitions

1. Accurate account data: Data quality is often defined as the suitability of data for its intended purpose. The source data that are compiled must be processed to provide an accurate view of the business. For the cable industry, regional data representations and inaccuracies result in inconsistencies of interpretation. This has created inaccuracies at the regional and corporate level, making tasks such as subscriber counts and behavioral trending analysis difficult. Strategic business initiatives, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), supply chain management, and business intelligence will be affected by inaccurate data.

2. Client characterization: Creating a clear and actionable view of your customers by understanding customer behavior at each interaction point with your business is complex. Customers can – and do – interact and transact across many different channels, buying different products – and each individual profile is unique. Marketers need to sort through oceans of data and construct segments to better move customers up the value chain. This requires flexible tools for creating customer segments based on a wide variety of customizable relationships and attributes. These segments become your foundation for more effective marketing, planning, and communications.

3.Multiple views of the client: Business questions are asked at the zone, DMA, region, division, and corporate levels. Regional questions tend to be related to local segmentation, marketing efforts, and call center issues. Corporate questions typically pertain to aggregations, cross region analysis, and trend analysis. A knowledge foundation must provide a consistent information view to the zone, DMA, division, and corporation and provide the flexibility to support other views that may become important.

Enabler Definitions

4. Transform billing data into a consistent subscriber view is the process of translating regional subscriber information into normalized information structures. For example, Basic Service has regional and corporate distinctions and significance. The transformation process normalizes information related to a subscriber's Basic Service so that it can be interpreted from a corporate perspective while maintaining its unique and volatile regional characteristics.

5. Bring information from disparate systems is the process of identifying, normalizing, and transforming the assets that exist through the corporation's internal and external data sources. For example, information from multiple instantiations of one or more billing systems will be consolidated into a single information repository.

6. Enhance subscriber data with value-add attributes (third-party data, propensity scores, data quality indicators) is the process of appending subscriber information with procured or derived data attributes. For example, standard deviations calculations can be stored on data attributes to provide an indication of the confidence level of specific data.

7. Cable industry data model is intellectual property developed by Teradata Corporation to support the information needs of the cable industry. Central to the information model is the party, defined as an individual (subscriber) or organization that is of business interest to the service provider. Important party relationships that are represented in the information model include product, offer, offer availability, location, service, network, channel, station, show, special events, schedule, advertisement, finance, internet, and event.

8. Teradata Database; consolidated database solution is the technology layer that enables the integration of diverse data assets into a uniform information model. The critical differentiator of the Teradata Database technology is its ability to linearly scale to meet the business requirements of more complex analytics in support of more users and applications against ever increasing volumes of data.

Business Benefits

9. Uncover and act upon trends occurring in other regions: When the customer data from all regions are combined, analysis can be performed to determine if a specific product/service/promotion is working or not. The results from analysis of another region can alter call center scripts before the first call is made. This information sharing will leverage the experiences of the entire enterprise to avoid duplicating campaigns that performed poorly and to emphasize the successful campaigns.

10. Utilize combined corporate data to determine true customer and product profitability: With disparate data, a customer's true profitability cannot be determined. A centralized view of all promotions, products, services, trouble tickets, and inbound calls, and the associated costs, is needed to determine profitability. For each organization the drivers of cost may be different, but the process and methodologies needed to gather these drivers are consistent. Once gathered at the lowest level of detail needed for analysis (a profit object), determining profitability becomes a simple math exercise of revenue-expenses.

11. Increase take-rate on up-sell campaigns: Through analysis of responders and non-responders, promotions can be targeted at the segments of customers most likely to respond to a specific offer. The segmentation could be sophisticated enough to act on a behavior trigger or a life event trigger and could also include historical behaviors combined with demographic profiling. With increased data and access to the data for intelligence mining, offers can be highly optimized resulting in double digit take-rates.

12. Reduce churn by proactively managing churn indicators: The sum of a customer's experience(s) with a provider will be the basis for determining the quality of the relationship. Good experiences typically result in a good relationship and vice versa. With a view into ALL of the customer experiences and a plan to act upon both good and bad experiences, a provider can proactively manage churn by understanding the customer experiences that, when ignored, cause churn.

13. Create value through a more intelligent, actionable segmentation scheme: Customer segmentation is much more than a profile or a sum of products and services purchased. Gaining a better understanding of the customer motivators and triggers will allow a customer to be proactively managed through and up a value-based segmentation evolution. If the customer life cycle is understood, the appropriate offers will be presented at a time that makes sense to the customer, not according to a marketing calendar.

14. Increase retention of high-value customers by ensuring the best level of service: Your best customers and those with the most potential will make up 20% of the customer base but 80% of revenue. Identifying these customers (see segmentation and profitability above) and then ensuring they receive the best service and flexibility in issue resolution is a challenge without data to support decisions. Call centers should be staffed with the appropriate quantity and quality of staff to handle the high-value customers. Analysis of high-value customer call patterns will give insight to the level of staffing needed to ensure this segment of your customers remains over-satisfied.

15. Increase margins by optimizing call center resources: Overall staffing and resource development can be optimized through detail customer call pattern analysis. A substantial (80%) portion of your customer base is slightly above and below the profitability line. Managing your human resources and technologies against these customers is, in some cases, the difference between positive and negative earnings. Beyond basic customer service, different levels of profitability and potential justify different levels in care and resolution treatments. Intelligently matching the level of service with the current and future value of the customer can only be achieved through analysis of the detail data.

To continue to successfully compete, the cable industry must move quickly to capture data from new transaction sources and integrate that information with traditional business data. This strong knowledge foundation will allow profitability to be maximized and customer satisfaction maintained. This white paper and its business opportunity definitions have identified a solution scenario that can enable this.

Christopher Smith is a Business Analyst in Media, Entertainment and Internet. Chris has been with Teradata for several years in a consultant role. His prior work experience was primarily focused on various roles in database and direct marketing. His knowledge and skill set was developed through a combination of education (BS/MBA Lehigh University) and working for companies such as Dun & Bradstreet, Columbia House, and Fleet Bank.