Measuring success

Measuring a strategy’s effect on customers is a crucial part of figuring out what works best to reduce customer churn.

SoundBite Communications Inc., based in Burlington, Mass., provides wireless carriers with a service that places automated voice calls to customers and tracks the outcome of that interaction. Some uses for the service include contract renewal reminder, payment reminders, customer satisfaction surveys and promotional campaigns.

SoundBite’s director of product management, John Keyes, gave some examples of successful campaigns in which making contact with customers made a demonstrable difference in customer behavior.

• One wireless carrier wanted to drive customer traffic to local stores when their contracts were up for renewal. The SoundBite call included a renewal reminder and then a prompt for customers to enter their ZIP code and be told where the closest stores were located. Within 72 hours of the messages being sent, traffic in multiple stores increased 10 percent to 15 percent, and many of the customers who received the message made additional in-store purchases.
• A customer that Keyes described as “a wireless carrier that needed to migrate a large segment of customers to its upgraded network in a short period of time” needed to get customers into its retail stores to have SIM cards replaced. SoundBite sent out voice calls that allowed customers to type in their area code to locate the nearest store. In this case, the effort worked a bit too well. “After a few days … the stores became flooded with customers,” Keyes said. One store, he said, had a rush of about 200 customers, with as many as 40 in line at a time waiting to swap out cards. “Our customer decided that they’d better slow down the calls and spread it out over a number of days,” Keyes said.

-By Kelly Hill