Keys to customer loyalty | Teradata Magazine

Monique isn't having a good day. She's on a hectic business trip. In between client meetings, she's tried to check her messages, download e-mail and return calls. But every other time she's used her handset, there's been difficulty connecting or the connection has been so poor she's given up in frustration.

Reception is even worse at her home office, especially with her new 3G handset. Still, she's tolerated it—at least until this trip. Now she's on a roadside call trying to close a major deal with an important customer when the call gets dropped. Monique has had it. She punches the number for customer care.

At the call center, Joe, the customer care representative, pulls up Monique's information on his screen. He sees that Monique is a high-value corporate customer who pays her bills on time. He cannot see Monique's bad experiences—she appears to have normal usage, and no network problems are being reported. Joe has no reason to think Monique is unhappy, so rather than focus on a resolution to her problem, he unknowingly adds insult to injury by trying to upsell her on new services.

Monique now has two bad experience points of reference: the poor quality of her wireless service and the frustration of the call center not understanding her needs. It doesn't take her long to cancel her service.

Managing the experience
Customer loss is the bane of the telecommunications industry. Acquiring new customers is expensive, in terms of marketing outlay, initial discounts and startup costs. To remain competitive, carriers need new approaches to strategic and operational intelligence that will allow them to introduce fresh business models and next-generation services while controlling costs. The problem is that next-generation services bring a new level of complexity to both consumer and carrier; this, in turn, can increase the cost of customer service, acquisition and retention.

Savvy carriers find ways to apply business intelligence (BI) to help them succeed. BI is only as good as the data on which it is based, however. Carriers need to leverage fresher and more relevant information to address modern customer experience management (CEM) objectives. Active data warehousing helps them do just that, combining operational support system (OSS) and business support system (BSS) data to better serve and retain high-value customers.

For carriers, customer loyalty and retention often boil down to understanding the customer experience: Was it good or bad? Giving users a positive experience is particularly critical during the 30-day introductory period because of buyer's remorse and offers from the competition.

For years, CEM has meant the retail experience, service touchpoints, even the bill. Customer satisfaction has been measured primarily through industry surveys and corporate metrics. The fact is that the telecommunications industry is uniquely positioned to use analytics for customer experience innovation. Each transaction a subscriber places on the network generates numerous customer key experience indicators (KEIs) for voice, data and content. These KEIs differ from usage data in that usage measures "how many" while KEIs measure "how good was it?"

Using KEI data, CEM can evolve to include ensuring the satisfaction of subscribers as they use their devices and services in their top locations. All that is required is active data warehousing capabilities and a good measurement system.

Accessing the data
It's not that carriers do not want to provide good service, especially to valuable customers—they just are not aware that their service is poor. Customers can have bad experiences without the network reporting any failures. Even if the network department sees a fault, it may be unable to drill down to sufficient detail to solve the problem or even know it involves a high-value customer.

The issues are many: When Monique calls in for help, the cost of service on her account rises but the revenue the carrier makes from her stays stable, or even drops if she avoids using her handset as she has lately.

Multiplied over millions of subscribers, this situation quickly erodes earnings. The company might make special offers to retain customers, but if the fundamental problems remain unsolved, those business models/offers may be unsustainable. As complexity of new packet-based services increases, carriers are finding it critical to measure and control the quality of new service launches.

Traditionally, telecommunications providers have separated network operations (represented by OSS data) from business functional areas (represented by BSS data). This presents a latency issue. Data used on the business and billing side of the operation is captured from the switching network and is generally subject to 30-day billing cycles and batch load processes. The typical time lag between the onset of bad service and the point at which the carrier identifies the customer is at risk can be 45 to 60 days, by which time the customer has often moved on. The goal of CEM is to reduce that latency and speed the identification of next best action to increase the effectiveness of retention efforts.

An active data warehouse can join near-real time network data with customer and financial data to generate actionable BI. KEIs can be extracted from what is known as the carrier's signaling network, which already exists as part of the telecommunications network topology, whether that network is wireless, wireline or broadband. The data can be passed to the active data warehouse from the signaling network at intervals that suit BI needs, including in near real time. Network departments can thus monitor every call or transaction for network and service assurance, combining signaling records for voice, data and content with performance of the network itself. The active data warehouse loads, joins, stores, retrieves and analyzes that data, providing up-to-date information about customers and services that can be only 15 to 60 minutes old.

Business intelligence in a box

The Teradata Network Signaling Warehouse, based on Agilent Technologies AssureME business intelligence (BI) solution, is designed to work with network signaling data to produce customer key experience indicators (KEIs) and actionable BI. A complete engineered reference platform scalable from the smallest carrier to the largest, the solution can grow to process billions of network transactions per day. The customer-centric BI gleans benefits not just for the individual subscribers but also for groups of subscribers who fit similar patterns.

Carrier network links are monitored to capture binary-format records of end-to-end network transactions, the network elements used in those transactions, and the result codes, including the various quality-of-service metrics that form the KEIs. The transactions may include subscriber identifiers that can act as keys to join the transaction to other tables within the information repository, such as the customer table.

After the binary data is transformed into ASCII, pre-defined extract, transform and load scripts automatically port the flat file transaction data into the active data warehouse. Here, additional transformations take place to optimize analytics and storage, yielding a defined physical dimensional data model, reference data, aggregation and history definitions.

The active data warehouse performs specialized analytics, pre-defined joins to reference data, packaged queries, semantic structures, packaged management reports and integration with tools such as SAP's Business Objects Enterprise Premium, Web Analytics and Voyager tools for graphical viewing. New reports can be quickly implemented on an ad hoc basis, tailored to a specific operator's needs. Other entity relationships are defined in both a physical and logical data model to create a complete BI roadmap.

—K.L.

Using the data
Active data warehousing allows marketing and service departments to leverage the network experience data for better CEM. It focuses on the missing dimensions, providing insight on the customer experience related to device, location, the last-mile connection and new 3G services. With the data and powerful analytics at their fingertips, marketing and service departments can manage subscriber quality of service (QoS), service level agreements and service requirements; reduce call center volumes; shorten problem resolution time; and create optimized "next best treatment" campaigns.

Specific analytics can bring big benefits. Assessments of handset performance, for example, can allow carriers to determine whether a sold handset is properly configured, if it successfully downloads specific content such as e-mail or games and efficiently connects to the network.

Carriers can evaluate the performance and popularity of specific handsets and drive that intelligence into their retail and supply chain operations. By integrating the performance of handset, service and network to detect devices with consistently poor QoS, customer care can proactively identify handsets that are preventing subscribers from using high-value services, which, consequently, adds to turnover.

Using active data warehousing to combine network and business data helps carriers identify where to invest capital and how to cut losses by isolating the most profitable customers, determining the most profitable services and associating profit segments with service experiences. The level of BI offered by this approach helps carriers make informed network planning decisions, better controlling capital and operational expenditures. Additionally, it enables better customer service at the time of contact and provides insights to the development of targeted advertising and promotions.

Combining network data with BI yields a powerful tool for profitability. With active data warehousing, carriers have all the information they need to reduce cost of acquisition and retention, while optimizing customer care.

Speaking of customer care, remember Monique? Let's turn the clock back, but this time, with actionable BI, Joe has a full understanding of Monique's experience.

The call with the important client has just been dropped. Before Monique can dial customer care, her phone rings.

It's Joe. "We're sorry to see all the difficulties you've been having," he says. "Our data shows that your handset is the problem. We also have plans to strengthen our coverage in your home area. I'm going to send you information on new handset options, and your last month's bill is on us."