Telstra digs down under data with SAS® to improve customer experiences.

In Australia's competitive marketplace, telecommunications providers battle for today's sophisticated and price-sensitive customers.

Providing both residential and business services, Telstra is one of Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company, with one of the best known brands in the country. The company offers a full range of services – fixed line, mobile phone, Internet and Internet TV – and competes in all telecommunications markets throughout Australia. Telstra provides more than 8.6 million fixed lines and 10.6 million mobile services, including 3G services to 8.2 million subscribers.

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about Telstra and its successes with SAS.

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Telstra operates in an extremely competitive environment. To increase the efficacy of its marketing, the company turned to business analytics and predictive modeling from SAS to help enhance customer service, provide relevant and value-added products to its clients, and help secure and grow its market  share.

"We've invested in our analytics environment because we view it as a significant component of our customer service," says Kate McKenzie, Chief Marketing Officer, Telstra. "Knowing what customer predilections are - like understanding when customers prefer to be called, what language they prefer to use and what services they're interested in - is extremely valuable and important to Telstra."

McKenzie adds that the SAS analytics environment is having a positive affect across the organisation, and the resulting efficiencies and insight support increased business effectiveness. As a result of predictive modeling capabilities, Telstra can provide its front-line representatives with information that helps them reduce customer churn, cross-sell and up-sell products, as well as drive customer acquisition programs. McKenzie says the company is expecting a 15 percent improvement in some of its recent retention campaigns as a direct result of its new analytics environment.

"We help the call center. We can help our shops. We can help the whole organisation make better, informed decisions," explains McKenzie. "We can get information about what customers are looking for to the front-line customer service staff so much more quickly. We do it in such a way that is simple and makes sense to them; it clearly makes a big difference in our service delivery."

Telstra's Teradata enterprise data warehouse is the single database for customer interactions, utilising segmentation, modeling and propensity scores for making marketing decisions. According to Sandra Hogan, Director of Customer Intelligence, quicker and more informed decisions are in part due to the partnership and tight integration between Teradata and SAS.

"A lot of opportunity arises from the integration of the two technologies. We can increase workflow and the controls around model development and maintenance so we can deploy significantly more models, giving us the ability to re-score customers daily rather than on a monthly basis. This gives us improved turnaround time on pricing decisions, promotions and content for improved customer satisfaction," she says. "Aligned data and analytics capabilities allow us to streamline processes; it's all about the timeliness of customer information for us now."

Sandra Hogan, Director of Customer Intelligence

"We've seen benefits already, particularly in processing large amounts of data and analytic computations," Hogan explains. "We have jobs that used to take 11 hours to run. In the new analytics environment, they are running in around 10 seconds. As we get further down the road, we want to increase our ability to track and predict customer behaviour, and improve customer experiences. This environment gives us 10 to 20 times the ability to do that."

"There's not many strong competitors in the analytics space," says Hogan. "We did speak to a couple of other suppliers, but they had nowhere near the level of sophistication and expertise of SAS. It made perfect sense to me."

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