Telecom calls on automation to improve market position

Vodafone Ukraine reduces customer churn by 30 percent with SAS^® Customer Intelligence

Vodafone Ukraine is nothing if not ambitious. The second-largest mobile operator in Ukraine has the ambitious goal of leapfrogging the competition with the help of SAS Customer Intelligence.  

“We are second in the market now and our main purpose is to become the market leader,” says Volodymyr Rybalko, Head of Customer Value Management at Vodafone Ukraine.

From a customer volume perspective, the goal appears within reach. Vodafone Ukraine currently serves 20 million customers – 6 million fewer than its top competitor. The company invested in SAS Customer Intelligence to help close the gap with analytics.

“Improving retention and generating more incremental revenue than our competition requires better decision making, more accurate propensity models, better targeting and faster campaign execution,” Rybalko says. “SAS helps us with all these, and gives us the flexibility to work faster, smarter and more efficiently.”

The pivotal first step

The Ukrainian telecommunications market is full of challenges. EU-driven legislation is resulting in stricter data management rules for telecoms. Political and economic insecurity remains a problem. And disruptive forces such as emerging mobile technologies, new competition and evolving consumer expectations are forcing providers to innovate for survival. 

If that’s not enough, the Ukraine telecommunication market is saturated, resulting in fierce competition for existing customers between the top service providers. 

Vodafone Ukraine is turning to analytics and marketing automation from SAS to address these challenges and provide thrust to its growing business. Critical to this effort is a strong data management practice to help the company more strategically use customer data.

In the past, targeting was out of reach due to the sheer volume and complexity of the data. Now, with the embedded data management tools of SAS Customer Intelligence, Vodafone Ukraine can more easily address every aspect of managing customer data – from ETL to data quality – a pivotal first step in personalizing and automating marketing campaigns.

30 percent reduction in churn

With data ready for analysis, marketers at Vodafone Ukraine applied clustering and segmentation techniques to 3,000 unique data points collected from the company’s billing system and other sources. This formed thousands of groups with similar characteristics, which marketers now use to create highly accurate retention models, determine ideal product mixes and next-best offers, and send more effective communications. 

This strategy has helped the company reduce customer churn by 30 percent. At the same time, incremental revenue has climbed by 2 percent. Elsewhere, the implementation of analytics has reduced data processing times from multiple weeks to one day, and increased the number of integrated communication channels from two to five.

Benefits abound, as campaign output has also rocketed. A made-for-marketing interface along with automated and trackable processes helps the telecom get more campaigns out the door faster. With SAS Customer Intelligence, Vodafone Ukraine has grown its number of targeted communications from 100 to 2,000 a month using the same human resources.

“I’m quite glad about our results with SAS,” Rybalko says. “I strongly recommend SAS for analytics, marketing personalization and campaign automation.”

Embracing marketing technology

The internal analytics community within Vodafone Ukraine has embraced the technology. Its number of SAS users has grown from 15 to 200 over the past five years, a rapid expansion Rybalko credits to the software’s robustness and ease of use.

“SAS is easy to understand for new users. It provides good tools for automating marketing tasks and solving a range of complicated analytical problems,” he says.

Today, almost all corporate analytics are based on SAS, according to Rybalko. “All customer-related business decisions are based on statistics we prepare in SAS. For example, we recently implemented a unique contact policy to protect customers from spam, and we constantly improve our predictive models to satisfy customer needs in other areas.”

Looking ahead, Vodafone Ukraine plans to expand its use of marketing technology. “In the future, we will implement a solution for real-time marketing using big data and analytics,” Rybalko says. “We’re eager to engage our customers with offers instantly based on real-time information.”