Software automation slows customer churn

Vodafone Australia recently replaced its manual marketing processes with an automated software solution, slowing customer churn to other operators.

The company claims a 17% share of the Australian mobile market and has more than three million subscribers connected to its GSM network. This network covers 93% of the Australian population.

Vodafone regularly targets more than a million of its customers with direct mail campaigns. The process of producing one of these campaigns was almost entirely manual, requiring a large degree of coordination and labour.

The company therefore decided that these largely manual marketing processes were increasingly inadequate. In particular, timeliness was increasingly a concern. This led to the company’s search for an advanced and automated software solution.

Campaign analytics and intelligence manager for Vodafone Australia Cahyadi Poernomo explains: “The catalyst for our decision to switch to an intelligent technical solution was the length of time it took to manually process the information we needed.

“We weren’t generating the response rates we’d hoped to. As we grow in terms of the number of campaigns over time, and as the campaigns become more integrated, it became impracticable to do this within our current capabilities.”

To solve this problem, Vodafone turned to marketing optimisation software from SAS.

“By implementing SAS’s marketing optimisation software, we estimated that we could significantly improve our return on investment for marketing campaigns whilst increasing customer satisfaction by being able to eliminate uncoordinated or conflicting marketing communications,” Poernomo says.

The mobile operator had several criteria for selecting a solution, as Poernomo explains: “The tool itself had good capabilities and was the best fit in terms of our current structure and systems in place. SAS also provides comprehensive 24/7 support, which, from our perspective, is fantastic.”

One of the major considerations in selecting the solution was the vendor’s experience with similar deployments, something that Poernomo says SAS fulfilled.

“One of the main benefits that SAS provided was its peoples’ knowledge and experience. It was very advantageous for us to have people on board that are expert in implementing similar solutions around the world,” he says.

The software solution has had the desired effect, as Poernomo explains: “Our campaign response rates have doubled and our churn has slowed dramatically.”