What began four years ago as an idea for regional mobile operator C Spire to find ways to make smarter decisions about customer retention efforts has resulted in an award-winning marketing analytics program that has improved its retention efforts’ success by 50%, according to the company.
Called Pulse, the proprietary data analytics solution the carrier built has garnered positive recognition this year, even beating out much larger competitors including Citrix and Intel in a recent competition held by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). C Spire was also ranked 35th in InformationWeek‘s Elite 100 due to its implementation of the program.
Justin Croft, manager of brand programs and analytics for C Spire, said the journey to Pulse started out with some basic predictive determinations about which customers were at risk of churning and why, “but more importantly, what is it about their experience, or things we have or haven’t done for them, that leaves us at risk?”
Pulse, according to Croft, was built on a collection of analytics tools (it’s proprietary to C Spire) and based on a next-best-action approach to customer interactions. It is integrated to all of C Spire’s customer interaction points, from its stores to its customer 800 number and its website.
Croft said that before Pulse, C Spire had done the traditional “brute force” assessments of customer experience, relying on surveys and anecdotes that it heard from customers.
“The analytics really took it to the next level,” he said, adding that it was able to shed light on “combinations of factors that we would not have come up with – that’s where the science comes in.”
Part of C Spire’s approach, he said, was rigor, which was cited in particular by the ANA when it honored C Spire last month.
“We really said, ‘Okay, let’s turn marketing on its head,'” Croft said. “Let’s not try to figure out, ‘who do we give this message to? We’ve got this message, who should hear it?'” Instead, he said, the company relied on data from its relationship to the customer to inform and tailor the message it should give to individual customers.
“Those are two very different approaches to communication: What do we want to tell you, vs. what do you need to hear in order to have the best outcome?” said Croft. “You’re not going to buy anything from us if you’re not happy with your experience.”
Part of the challenge with predictive analytics for telecom operators, Croft said, is that the numbers are often so small: A model could predict that a customer will not churn, and it could be right 99% of the time.
“When you’re looking at things like churn, the numbers get so small, so fast, that you have to invent new ways to elevate a model that says accurate and relevant to customers,” Croft said. C Spire is privately held and does not report its churn figures; the company serves about 1 million wireless customers.
C Spire is seeing “really encouraging” results from the program, Croft said. Besides the figure he cited in 50% improvement in retention efforts, he added that sales of new products using Pulse have done incredibly well. He said that by factoring in information such as recent handset upgrades or the purchase rate of a particular accessory, C Spire has been able to target its marketing so that when messaging about a particular accessory goes out, purchases of that accessory go up by more than 250%.
