The good news: Competition is rampant in at least 50 of the top markets. The bad news: Churn is on the rise. This time around, however, applications developers say they have perfected customer-service and tracking software that can help a carrier keep good customers before they bail out for a cheaper monthly fee or newer bells and whistles.
Until recently, most carrier customer-service software was used to prequalify and then sign up new subscribers, performing a credit check and gauging ability to pay. Once that exercise was completed, customer records gathered dust until, perhaps, just before a contract was to expire. With little or no contact with their operator during the year, what incentive would a customer have to stay?
A renewed focus on building customer loyalty has spurred the creation of programs aimed at helping marketing personnel better understand customer needs, and to address those needs more often in order to save good subscribers who may be thinking of leaving.
Exhibiting at Wireless ’98 last month in Atlanta, Metapath Software Corp., headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., released its Ceer marketing and customer-loyalty tracking software, which compiles a record of customer experiences based on service calls, mobility patterns, features usage and satisfaction factors. The company’s mission-“to provide real-time customer information software products to telecommunications carriers worldwide that significantly reduce cost, increase revenue and build customer loyalty”-is driven by such factors as competition; the imperative to lower carriers’ unit costs while retaining and acquiring customers, thus making money; and improved cash flow via attention to customer needs.
Changing from a “network-centric” company mindset to a “customer-centric” model involves a certain amount of turnaround, but it is necessary to shift from a tactical standpoint to a strategic one in a competitive environment. According to a Metapath white paper circulated last summer, “An important component of a customer-adaptive system is that the key data are collected in real time in a customer record, where every interaction is specified not by percentages but by individual experiences. All information about a single customer is in one place, so that the total customer experience can be understood, planned for, marketed to and serviced.”
The final Ceer product was developed based on three months of call-detail records provided by an unnamed “major” wireless carrier. Metapath collected data regarding dropped, blocked and completed calls; customer service; directory assistance; voice-mail access calls and their duration; forwarded unanswered calls; and feature usage customer by customer. The Ceer software also was able to provide hourly call-detailing and cell-site distribution characteristics. In turn, the pilot carrier was able to create marketing packages based on this data.
Also exhibiting at Wireless ’98 was Athene Software, a Boulder, Colo., start-up company that debuted a new line of products for carriers, enabling them to prequalify subscribers, predict profitability and credit risk, decrease customer churn and activate new customers via the Internet. The software will track a subscriber’s action throughout his or her lifetime with the carrier, and it also has the capability to predict how much money a particular subscriber may generate during a contract period.
The Advanced Predictive Technology platform was so new at the show that Athene’s Howard Kaushansky could only talk about it without benefit of charts and paperwork. Kaushansky said Athene’s data would be considered accurate during a six- to 12-month period, and that the predominate use of APT would be to track and care for high-end users, those who normally are the first to drop a carrier if customer service and/or a particular service plan is not performing up to snuff.
