Hong Kong Mobile Giant CSL Keen on SAS^{?/sup> 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, high penetration rate of over 109% particularly in 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 eCRM strategy since 2000 and aims to further strengthen customer loyalty and increase customer value. How does eCRM operate at CSL? CSL believes that their competitive edge should be in delivering excellent customer experiences - responsive and relevant, in addition to product and service differentiation (e.g. net­work & data service). eCRM is seen as one of the key differentiators, which enriches CSL's knowledge on its cus­tomers and supports its continuous competitive strategies. The company operates eCRM in 3 major areas: ana­lytical eCRM, operational eCRM and knowledge eCRM. "Analytical eCRM, like a foundation of a building, is the pre-requisite among the 3 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 for identifying risks and opportuni­ties among our customers and deriv­ing insightful customer analytics for making solid business decisions and executing effective marketing cam­paigns," said Joshua Chan, General Manager, Competitive Strategy & Planning of CSL. CSL has partnered with SAS for over 3 years now. SAS business intelli­gence technology, including data min­ing, is used to help CSL understand their customers and gain a holistic view on customer behavioural pat­terns. The analysis results are applied in 3 major areas: customer intelligence for frontline staff, effective campaign management and customer lifecycle management. Key users include the management team in strategic planning department, marketing department for campaign execution and frontline staff for customer serving. "SAS provides us with a comprehen­sive business intelligence solution. We deploy SAS to do various kinds of customer analyses like customer segmentation, profiling and on-going behaviour tracking for understanding and predicting customer preference and changing usage. These types of customer intelligence are crucial to us for designing targeted marketing programmes to increase hit rate and efficiency. At the same time, those intelligence would also be passed to the frontline staff as a real-time opera­tional statistics in form of self-explanatory set of information scorecard on each customer. That is very effective to support interactive, targeted customer selling and servicing." To achieve and devise the true benefits from eCRM, CSL realizes that eCRM is an on-going exercise. After running different customer analyses, planning the right marketing strategies and executing the marketing campaigns, the results and feedback will be 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 keep timely tracking on the market changes for taking quicker actions. As the customer knowledge and experience accumulated, the company can proactively respond to the market change. Strong partnership with SAS CSL has chosen SAS to be the close partner for its eCRM initiatives. The key selection criteria are the professional­ism, support and comprehensiveness of the technology that 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 that is scalable to accom­modate our needs. For instance, we run the DMM performance testing using SAS. They keep improving the run time of model and even exceeds our expectations." Chan stated. "We have trust and confidence in SAS' solutions and services as SAS has kept invest­ing resources on R&D to strengthen its core competencies as the market leader in the analytics area. We share this same spirit with SAS that CSL strives for continuous improvement to increase customer value and provide the best service for our customers." What in the future? With strong corporate commitment to eCRM and its effective use of technol­ogy and applications, CSL gears to build more sustainable edges on ser­vices apart from reputed brands. CSL possesses large customer base with huge customer data and transactional data from different channels. That is the valuable asset for leveraging more. "There are a lot of information and behaviour pattern hidden inside our data which is dynamic and ever-changing," Chan added. "In the next 5 years, we would keep facilitating a closed-loop marketing process for enhancing our learning. It is necessary for us to integrate different systems together, optimize the technology for full utilization and for seamless application as well as increasing the depth and scope of customer analysis to enrich our database for exploring more hidden customer behavioural pattern so as to deliver better customer service and to identify more cross-sell and up-sell opportunities." Chan concluded. 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 became the world's first operator to introduce a 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% owned by Telstra.

Joshua Chan
General Manager
Competitive Strategy & Planning of Hong Kong CSL Limited

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