Page 508 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

Network Organization and Governance 4-39

Once the campaign has been defined, it is executed via the contact management capability.
BI can be a very effective means of analyzing, organizing, and monitoring the complex barrage of
information generated in one’s business and helping to generate a more effective business model for
increasing revenue by keeping one’s customer base happy and increasing profitability by cutting costs.

4.3.4.4 Customer Retention
BI tools can be applied to a variety of processes forming the telecom service provider’s business. These
business processes can be customer retention, cost cutting, or traffic management. For customer reten-
tion, strategic decision support BI tools would be used to track key performance metrics relative to
customer install and disconnect activity and would assist telecommunications companies.
• This would provide early warning of increasing disconnect activity.
• If disconnect activity began to grow beyond acceptable limits, it would analyze why customers
were disconnecting and extrapolate the impact on profitability.
• If the profitability impacts were not acceptable, it would formulate strategies for retention.
Once strategies were formulated, it would develop predictive models that would align retention strat-
egies to the appropriate customers. Scoring and segmentation BI tools would assist telecommunications
companies by applying predictive models from strategic decision support BI tools to the entire base of
customers, assigning a score value.
The campaign assignment BI tool would assist telecommunications companies by applying scores
from the scoring BI tool and other relevant data to assign customer lists to the appropriate retention
campaigns.
Business management would initiate these campaigns and manage their execution. As feedback is
returned from business management, input would be used by strategic decision support to refine reten-
tion strategies.
As may be deduced, a number of capabilities are needed to support a single business need (e.g., reten-
tion), and these capabilities are integrated through the business process. What may not be quite as
evident is that these capabilities can be reused to support other business needs, such as customer care or
fraud. Capabilities are essential to providing telecommunications companies with the ability to respond
to the changing needs of their customers and the marketplace quickly and cost-effectively.

4.3.5 Disappointments from the Past and Barriers to Business Intelligence

Business intelligence solutions have had rather moderate success in terms of adding true business value
to telecommunications companies. Notwithstanding the large investments in building BI solutions,
telecommunications companies continue to face serious challenges in accessing data that is trustworthy,
complete, and accurate, and data that makes business users self-sufficient.
Indeed, it is not uncommon to come across telecommunications companies where marketing and
finance departments yield two different results on a critical input such as the success rate of campaigns.
Also, if one adds up the time business users spend attempting to learn minute technical details in order
to be self-sufficient and the costs of different departments acquiring their own technology pool to sup-
port their respective business needs, the drain on a telecommunications company’s resources could
be considerable.
On the other hand, though, technology departments tend to believe BI solutions have been extremely
successful. Essentially, this is because technology teams assess success in terms of a very large database
being implemented or a complex ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Load) problem being addressed
within the telecommunications company, as is frequently the case when a BI solution is implemented.
Therefore, although BI solutions may have been technological success stories, their true value in terms of
enhancing the trustworthiness of information or providing a holistic view has been limited.