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Do the volume and duration of long-distance calls made in the non-peak hours translate into net gains for a telecom service provider? Else, why did a chunk of users switch to the competition in a specific month? Such queries are no longer tackled by  educated guesses, but business intelligence solutions come into play. Arjun Erry tells us why...

In an age ruled by ROI, why would enterprises go in for business intelligence solutions, which have essentially been in the "nice-to-have" category?
Take the case of a telecom company, which typically loses customers even as it adds new ones. Let's assume the cost of adding is approximately Rs 1,500 per customer. When the primary aim is to reduce loss  and improve acquisition, it is critical to have accurate information about why a customer walks out. Occurrences like increased number of complaint calls or delayed payment cycles just before a customer discontinues the service, need to be recorded and analyzed  in order to curb the churn, Instead of increasing the cost of acquiring a new customer by making unlimited cold calls or resorting to unsolicited mail. It makes sense to identify which subset of people has largest number of potential users and attack that segment. If you have good customer intelligence, you will also know the customer's preferred mode of response and attract customers. These are classic examples of business intelligence being used to increase RoI.

About  14% of SAS' business globally comes from the government. What is the opportunity of tapping this segment in India?
Government departments in India  understand that they need to use business intelligence. How soon they start using it would depend on the IT readiness of each department. Business intelligence could be very useful in the defense segment. Currently, there are several government agencies that have defense related data. Collating and analyzing information from these diverse sources would  yield some critical findings. We have been interacting with certain defense organizations and hope to work with them.

Most of your customers are large enterprises. Which are the segments you are targeting?
Orange, Novartis, HDFC, Reserve Bank of India, Bharti Cellular and Hindustan Lever are among our key clients. But, we haven't excluded anyone. All enterprises can use business intelligence solutions, but provided they have the  IT-readiness, not just in terms of processes and systems, but a management with a zeal to understand and adopt what we have.