Winning over Hong Kong Customers

Hong Kong is a leading telecommunications hub for the Asia/Pacific region. The number of mobile phone users grew rapidly to 4.5 million at the end of April 2000 from about 2.9 million at the end of 1998. With the widespread use of mobile phones, the penetration rate of pagers dropped to about 5 percent of the total population in April 2000 from about 8 percent at the end of 1998. 

As telecommunications companies have lost their protective monopolies and entered a new era of competition, most of them have found that customer service is the factor that differentiates the best from the rest – especially when everyone has the same technology and services to sell. In this volatile market, telecom companies face the challenge of building customer loyalty and minimizing customer turnover. Hutchison Telecommunications (Hong Kong) Ltd. has chosen Enterprise Miner from SAS to gain and sustain lasting competitive advantage through better business insights.

Hutchison Telecom is the management company for Hutchison Whampoa Group's wireless communications operations in Hong Kong, which include a mobile communications operation with a subscriber base of 1.6 million, representing the largest share of the local mobile phone market. "We are devoted to technical excellence as much as to service excellence," says Alan Lau, senior manager of the Information Technology Division at Hutchison Telecom. "In order to achieve this, we are striving to understand our customers' needs better and even faster. SAS is our vendor of choice for data mining solutions to satisfy customers by matching specific marketing initiatives with clients based on customer profiles."

Hutchison Telecom is actively expanding its portfolio of service offerings in mobile Internet, high-speed data communications. "With our ambitious expansion, we sought to consider the efficient cooperation between marketing and IT from the start of the project. SAS Enterprise Miner helps us profile customer activity through the data mining process," says Ronald To, system architect at Hutchison Telecom. "By analyzing and reporting on our 'customer view,' every communications and marketing channel can be used more effectively through a detailed analysis of customers' behavior and preferences, giving us the opportunity to exploit this knowledge and accurately drive our business forward."

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