C Spire looks towards CRM to remain competitive
Reducing churn is always a goal for mobile operators. This task has become more important as many mobile markets are seeing increased competition from both inside and outside the traditional telecom space.
In a recent RCR Wireless News report, reduced churn was mentioned by a number of people as one of the most important aspects of more robust CRM efforts. This issue has become more important for mobile operators as many in mature markets are now fighting with rivals over the same customers.
Operators noted that CRM is often the first point of contact with a customer and thus set the tone for all future interactions. Get it right the first time and there is a better chance that a customer will go into all future interactions with a positive mindset and lower propensity to churn.
One way to boost the chances of a positive first interaction is to have as much information on a customer as possible, thus reducing miscommunication and the potential for a negative experience. No reason to tee up a customer to be stolen by a rival if at all possible.
“CRM has become very important for us for competitive reasons,” explained Justin Croft, manager of regional operator C Spire’s brand platform analytics program. “With the current levels of saturation, carriers are just stealing customers from each other. The need to keep and maintain one’s customer base has become a simple math issue. It’s much less expensive to keep those you have than attract those from rivals.”
This mindset has become especially apparent in recent months as mobile operators have targeted the customer base of rivals with offers to pay off early termination fees and provide superior trade-in value for devices. These additional upfront costs, though tempered by a reduction in device subsidies, have made the need to keep customers instead of relying on stealing customers a more poignant financial decision.
To help with keeping current customers happy, mobile operators are increasingly turning to analytics platforms to help them dig into potential insight that is already available on their networks.
Croft noted that C Spire’s CRM platform taps into its analytics program that allows for an “action-oriented” approach into how C Spire enables all of its customer relationship touch points to be on the same page in terms of how the carrier deals with each customer.
“There are so many reasons why a customer calls or walks into a store,” Croft explained. “Has this customer called us four times today? A lot of call centers can’t even tell that. It’s important to have and know predictive factors into knowing if a customer may leave and how a customer care person can handle that. … We are recording these interactions across channels.”
Croft added that these moves are not just attempt to mitigate churn, but to also see if there are any service issues the customer may be experiencing or if a particular customer is ripe to add a new line of service. To reach this level of insight, C Spire pulls data from across the organization in order to paint a customized picture of each customer.
“We pull data from all over the organization, primarily from our billing system and customer interactions, though also from billing usage,” Croft said. “We use this to create what we call a comparable quality metric. … The key is to bring all of this into one spot for analysis, breaking down the silos so we can understand collectively how to better relate with our customers.”
For more on the CRM topic please check out our feature report “Customer Relationship Management: Predicting Subscriber Health” and our accompanying webinar on the topic.
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