EUR 6.9 million in revenue and savings by transforming customer data into business and operational actions

Clearing a way through complexity
The historical success of this major European CSP had already attracted more than 20 million mobile subscribers. However, like lots of successful CSPs, the company had transformed itself many times as it grew and acquired smaller players. This left it with an inherent systems and operations complexity:

• around 200 systems served data to all the CSP’s departments, sometimes not providing the right information
• information was scattered throughout the legacy systems and could not be brought together to provide one view to the customer
• this resulted in clear difficulties to develop actionable customer insights in which to base profitable customer experience management

The result was a toxic combination of high operational expenditure (OPEX) and falling ARPU in a highly competitive market, eroding the CSPs profitability.

The problem came to a head when the CSP was looking to launch a new service implying new technology in a convergent ecosystem and realized it did not have the tools to monitor the take-up or success of the service, neither a clear view of the internal processes impacted. This spurred the company to call in Nokia Siemens Networks to explore its options.

The Nokia Siemens Networks team was multidisciplinary, combining network, technology, systems and business understanding capabilities. Their remit was to understand the requirements and propose a solution to build the link between the several data sources and the multiple business and operational needs shown in the illustration:

The solution was implemented across CSP ́s organization. The following pages show 3 examples of how different departments obtained real business results.

Customer care saves EUR 1.4 million by solving incidents before customers call
Customer care is one of the most high-profile contact points that any CSP has with its customers. This company understood that good care was an essential part of a superior customer experience and Nokia Siemens Networks found that the CSP’s existing solutions were not performing effectively.

 

The overarching and coherent Nokia Siemens Networks solution now generates a clear view of what’s happening across the network in real time, right down to the subscriber level. It’s a fast-track approach to problem-solving that often enables CSPs to fix problems before their customers even notice them.

The solution has achieved a 95 percent cut in the average time taken to spot a network incident causing service unavailability that could affect the experience of customers. It has also boosted the analysis and resolution time of network problems by 32 percent, leading directly to EUR 600,000 in additional revenues thanks to increased network availability.

This in turn yielded OPEX savings of 210,000 euros in 2009, simply by reducing the number of complaints that customers made to the call center. And there are even more savings further up the care structure. OPEX has fallen by 13 percent for second line care in 2009 and that is expected to reach 20 percent by 2010.

Marketing improves data services use, generating EUR 5 million revenue
Considerable effort and investment in marketing had not been enough for the CSP to drive up the adoption of its data services significantly, even with the added inducement of attractive price plans. Just one in five of the company’s end users were data customers. Taking advantage of the Nokia Siemens Networks customer insights solution, the consultants were able to understand the end-customer experience using the data services (i.e. impossibility to access the network), and therefore made available in real-time the relevant list of affected users to allow building a proper automated corrective process.

 

Three months later and the new system had already solved the problems of 300,000 data users. This reduced costs at the same time as increasing revenues, avoiding affected customers calling the call center.

Being able to see clearly which type of device each customer is using also helped the marketing department, which could target its campaigns more effectively. For instance, the CSP can now see which customers have MMS- capable devices but have never used MMS, making them ideal candidates for a marketing push.

In all, the additional revenues from improved data usage are expected to reach 2M euros next year and 5M euros the year after that.

Operations team rises network availability and protects revenue by EUR 500 000
In an extensive network such as this, many hundreds of major adjustments, affecting network availability, need to be made each year. But because the company’s systems are so complex. It previously took hours to check that any network changes were made correctly. If not, lengthy data analysis was needed to find out what was wrong. Worse still, any resulting service outages or other problems could be affecting the company’s customers during the entire time. Instant feedback is one of the biggest benefits that the new Nokia Siemens Networks solution have delivered to the CSP’s engineers.

The Nokia Siemens Networks solution recognizes and reports back within minutes if any network changes are threatening to impact on end-user services. This faster fault identification improves network availability, leading to happy customers and keeping revenue-generating services up and running. In all, the improved network availability is expected to protect EUR 500,000 revenue per year.