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The 3R’s to most people would refer to the basics that one is expected to pick up in school: reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic. For BPL Mobile, it is 3R’s with a difference. As BPL Mobile senior vice-president & COO (CAM), Deepak Varma, succinctly puts it: “It is all about the 3R’s—relationship, retention and revenue.”

Customer Asset Manage-ment (CAM) is what BPL Mobile has employed to gain “the service edge” over other operators. While acquiring the customer is the first step, retaining the customer is equally important. BPL Mobile has put together a CAM team. The attempt is to understand customer behaviour and obtain those key insights which are invaluable to the company. Terming CAM a “prime asset of the company” is significant since the focus will be on touching the customer through superior technology to hold, nurture and harvest this asset for revenue enhancement.

An effective CAM tool will reduce the exit barrier for the customer. “We have been working systematically towards understanding what the customer really wants and the exercise has been very helpful. The churn levels have dropped greatly and our high net worth customers are still with us,” points out Mr Varma.

How is this achieved? BPL Mobile has employed online tools to effectively control churn. This facilitates in rectifying the problem early and preventing a possible loss of customer. One of its effective tools called “E-Miner” is very handy when it comes to analysing data. It is a mining tool and is employed for segmentation.

E-Miner, a trademark of software company SAS, is a business intelligence (BI) tool and is used in other industries (like pharmaceuticals) as well. BI helps in building a data warehouse platform on which business data can be stored. This business data is invaluable to the company since it goes a long way in studying, for instance, the credit history of a subscriber. E-Miner can also point to specifics such as why a particular subscriber has not opted for roaming or even details on segmentation.

Another tool that is employed is “ETL” or extract transform and load. This answers questions like—what kind of consumers will give high revenue? Using data specifications, such consumers can be tracked online. There are various kinds of information available to an operator. ETL helps in transforming this plethora of data attain a meaningful form.

Statistical tools are also used by BPL Mobile. Among these are regressive and ensemble models. The question of which tool to use where depends on the kind of data that is required to be analysed. Essentially, attributes are taken and fed into the system and results can be obtained online. “Clementine” is another mining tool being employed. Similar to a data warehouse, it is a statistical package for social sciences.

BI tools are employed by BPL to achieve pre-defined business objectives and to meet challenges. The first step is to build a data warehouse platform, where the data is converted to a form that is meaningful and useful. Importantly, subscriber data that has been gathered employs mining tools that finally provide relevant information—for churn prediction, customer segmentation, demand forecasting and fraud management.

Churn is a cause of concern for any operator; that is exactly the reason for value-added services becoming so vital. Using what is referred to as the “customer data warehouse”, loyalty programmes are designed and new revenue opportunities can be created. The customer data warehouse, as BPL views it, is part of an integrated approach to identify new customer categories and retaining existing ones.

Churn models help predict which customers will churn and when. It is from that stage onwards when loyalty programmes are developed—to prevent attrition/churn and to develop programmes to win back customers who have left the system. This would be based on an understanding of what caused them to leave.

It is easy to understand why the subscriber churn can give any operator a tough time. A cellular market, like in India, can be aptly called “ruthless” in the wake of huge price cuts and operators vying with each other to retain their customer base while simultaneously looking for new ones. While IT and the Internet provide the all-important link on who is spending how much, CAM is the differentiator that identifies categories and individuals in order to build a larger base of satisfied subscribers.

SAS assists BPL in several ways which includes information on billing amounts, for instance. Interestingly, the market itself is unpredictable and, thus, the customer’s needs at one point in time is very different from another. “It is important to understand that the model has to be retrained all the time. This is largely because of the dynamics that are continuously changing” states Mr Varma.

An exercise like CAM, very often, takes a while before it begins to yield results. To ensure the customer always has something to look forward to, BPL Mobile has in place loyalty programmes, credit cards (the company has tied up with ICICI for this) apart from services on the GPRS (general packet radio service) and MMS (multimedia messaging service) front.

Beyond all this, of course, is the role of the Internet. The process begins with what the customer needs in terms of information. Once this is available to him, a host of activities follow.

The information that he asks for gives the company valuable leads on the nature of the customer and also helps in anticipating what he might require later. The Internet facilitates in putting this information into more meaningful categories to classify the customers. Based on this information areas like churn analysis, predictive modelling and segmentation analysis evolve.