Page 513 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

4-44 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

Information Exploitation
Multi-dimensional Customer Value
Analysis Management Data Mining

Executive Churn Prediction
Reporting
Information System
Complementary Information Domains

Customer Traffic Financial Supply Chain
Analytics Analytics Analytics Analytics

Data Extraction and Loading Methods

Provisioning Billing CRM . ..

Operational Systems

FIGu RE 4.3.4 Customer information system.
ranging from operational legacy applications, to call center systems, to the data warehouse and its asso-
ciated data marts.
Although the technologists in the telecommunications industry understand the need for consoli-
dated customer information, the business units of most companies across the industry until recently
maintained their disparate systems. However, today’s organizations are leveraging BI in conjunction
with CRM solutions in numerous ways to derive hitherto unseen benefits and business opportunities.
Using BI tools, the intelligence can be built into CRM applications as well.
Another point in favor of a BI–CRM combination is the fact that many organizations already have a
CRM solution in place. It makes more sense for such enterprises to leverage existing CRM investments
and deploy a full-fledged BI system. This will ensure that data from all the data sources (including the
CRM) can be brought under one roof for a better all-round perspective of the business.
In today’s extremely challenging business environment, telecommunications companies are under
intense pressure to reduce or eliminate the major threats to these slim margins: revenue leakage, churn,
inefficient network usage, and least-cost routing plans.
Telecommunications companies rely on analysis of their terabytes of call data record (CDR) data to
help them make business-critical decisions that will positively affect their bottom line. High-end data
warehouses and powerful business intelligence solutions are essential tools to help carriers meet profit
goals.
Many critical telecommunications functions rely on fast complex analysis of CDR data. Key initia-
tives include analyzing behavior data using CRM programs to optimally target services and reduce
churn, ensuring complete and accurate billing and modeling call behavior with revenue assurance pro-
grams, and optimizing network operations using operations management programs. These initiatives
all benefit from improved access to CDR-level data, access to large quantities of historical information
for trend analysis, and from the ability to quickly run complex BI queries.
These significant performance limitations force carriers to make a choice. They must decide whether to
summarize or filter the data for analysis, or create a massive, often complex CDR warehouse to analyze call