Hong Kong mobile giant CSL keen on SAS® Customer Intelligence to drive actions

In today's world of telecommunications, success or failure hinges largely on improving existing customer relationships and profitability, reducing operating expenses and managing risk, all while maintaining – or increasing – shareholder value. Hong Kong is a leading telecommunications hub for the Asia-Pacific region, with six key operators competing fiercely under a limited market growth space and a high penetration rate of over 109 percent, particularly in the mobile market.

CSL, a leading mobile multimedia services provider in Hong Kong, has strong brands and market preference as the key edge over its competitors. To stand out from the crowd and defend its market position, the company has been committed to a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy since 2000 and aims to further strengthen customer loyalty and increase customer value.

How does CRM operate at CSL?
CSL believes that its competitive edge should be in delivering excellent customer experiences – responsive and relevant, in addition to product and service differentiation (e.g. network and data service). CRM is seen as one of the key differentiators, which enriches CSL’s knowledge of its customers and supports its continuous competitive strategies. The company operates CRM in three major areas: analytical CRM, operational CRM and knowledge CRM.

"Analytical CRM, like the foundation of a building, is the prerequisite among the three areas. CSL believes that analysis drives actions. As a leader, we are extremely advanced in applying customer analytics and business intelligence (BI) in our daily marketing and sales operations. As we deal with a large customer base, we need a highly effective BI solution in order to support us in identifying risks and opportunities among our customers and deriving insightful customer analytics for making solid business decisions and executing effective marketing campaigns," says Joshua Chan, General Manager, Competitive Strategy and Planning at CSL.

CSL has partnered with SAS for over three years now. SAS business intelligence technology, including data mining, is used to help CSL understand its customers and gain a holistic view of customer behavioral patterns. The analysis results are applied in three major areas: customer intelligence for frontline staff, effective campaign management and customer life-cycle management. Key users include the management team in the strategic planning department, the marketing department for campaign execution and frontline staff for serving customers.

"SAS provides us with a comprehensive business intelligence solution. We deploy SAS to do various kinds of customer analyses such as customer segmentation, profiling and ongoing behavior tracking for understanding and predicting customer preference and changing usage. These types of customer intelligence are crucial to us for designing targeted marketing programs to increase hit rate and efficiency. At the same time, that intelligence is also passed to the frontline staff as real-time operational statistics in the form of a self-explanatory set of information scorecards on each customer. That is very effective in supporting interactive, targeted customer selling and servicing."

To achieve the true benefits from CRM, CSL realizes that CRM is an ongoing exercise. After running different customer analyses, planning the right marketing strategies and executing the marketing campaigns, the results and feedback are evaluated and looped back to the whole system to form a closed-loop marketing practice. This is done not only to facilitate a continuous learning process but also to enable the company to track market changes in a timely manner so that it can take action faster. As customer knowledge and experience accumulate, the company can respond proactively to market changes.

Strong partnership with SAS
CSL has chosen SAS to be the close partner for its CRM initiatives. The key selection criteria are the professionalism, support and comprehensiveness of the technology, which facilitates the company to drive strategic actions. "SAS is like a friend to us. We are impressed by their knowledge of our industry and environment, as well as SAS’ strong technical support and their continuous improvement of the technology, which is scalable to accommodate our needs. For instance, we run the DMM performance testing using SAS and the run time of the model keeps on improving, which exceeds our expectations," Chan says. "We have trust and confidence in SAS’ solutions and services as SAS has kept investing resources in R&D to strengthen its core competencies as the market leader in the analytics area. We share this same spirit with SAS in that CSL strives for continuous improvement to increase customer value and provide the best service for our customers."

What of the future?
With strong corporate commitment to CRM and its effective use of technology and applications, CSL is gearing itself up to build a more sustainable edge in services apart from reputed brands. CSL possesses a large customer base with a huge amount of customer data and transactional data from different channels. That is a valuable asset for leveraging more.

"There are a lot of information and behavior patterns hidden inside our data, which is dynamic and ever-changing," Chan says. "In the next five years, we will keep facilitating a closed-loop marketing process in order to enhance our learning. It is necessary for us to integrate different systems, optimize the technology for full utilization and seamless application, and increase the depth and scope of customer analysis. This will enrich our database and enable us to explore more hidden customer behavioral patterns so as to deliver better customer service and identify more cross-sell and up-sell opportunities."

About CSL
CSL is a pioneer in the mobile communications market in Hong Kong. The company launched its mobile services in 1983, and today operates a world-class GSM/Dual Band network through its mobile brands: 1O1O and One2Free. CSL was the world’s first operator to introduce High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).

In October 2001, CSL was awarded a 3G Mobile Service Licence in Hong Kong. The company continues to develop innovative and sophisticated data services and is committed to building a world-class 3G infrastructure for both end-users and application developers, leading local mobile communications into a new era. CSL is 100 percent owned by Telstra.

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