Telecom Provider Gains Accurate View of Customers Across Business Lines, Resulting in Better Identification of Target Households

Challenges

A leading European telecom service provider wanted to generate better marketing analytics of their customers in order to identify additional revenue opportunities. They also wanted to improve the automation of their reporting process to best take advantage of this new information. The telecom operator had multiple offerings – including fixed line, mobile, internet, and television – across multiple sales channels and multiple billing systems. They struggled with high levels of non-unique addresses, inconsistent data formats, and quality issues across the different systems. Gaining an accurate view of their customers was a challenge, making it difficult to assess additional revenue opportunities within their existing customer base and with potential new customers.

Solution

After an extensive review of software vendors, the telecom operator chose Innovative Systems to assist them in this initiative because of Innovative’s high accuracy Enlighten and PostLocate software, robust approach, and solid experience in addressing these types of business issues, all at a reasonable cost.

An initial assessment of the data was conducted by profiling all of the data across multiple sources. After the customer name, address, and account data was parsed, standardized, and deduped, geocodes were appended to identify the exact location of each customer’s residence or office. The geocodes enabled the telecom provider to append external data such as mobile coverage areas, fiber availability, demographics, and social-economic information to gain a more complete picture of their customers, as well as to identify new areas of opportunity. Using Innovative’s householding solution, customers living in the same households were accurately identified to provide a consolidated view of each household across multiple lines of business.

Results

The telecom operator was able to gain an accurate view of their customers by household. This enabled them to identify potential customers for cross-selling and upselling their television, mobile, internet, and landline offerings. The company now had answers to many questions they weren’t able to answer before, such as how many unique customers or households were using multiple services; exactly how many services were being used by each household; and which were the low and high margin households. Based on this new information, they were able to produce detailed sales analysis and budgets.

The company was also able to use their marketing resources more effectively by targeting households and regions where they had limited penetration with tailored offerings and promotions. These targeted marketing campaigns resulted in a significant uptake vs. the control group, leading to a 10% increase in their post-paid customer base and increased the penetration of households using three or more services to 18%.

The ability to cross-reference location information against external reference data enabled the provider to identify the best areas for future fiber network rollout as well as new regions to target.