Orange Business Services sees 30 percent productivity boost using SAS® for CRM

With 323,000 access points - and clients ranging from individual business users to multinational corporations -Orange Business Services boasts the world's most extensive IP VPN network. To keep that many customers happy, OBS unified – and now steers – its CRM strategy with SAS. The result: a 30 percent gain in productivity.

OBS provides telecommunications services to businesses in 220 countries and territories, placing the combined expertise and know-how of Equant, Orange and France Telecom right at its clients' fingertips. Offerings range from traditional voice services to the most complex data exchange solutions, including cloud computing, mobile enterprise applications and M2M services.

The issues
Before uniting around a customer-driven strategy, OBS viewed clients as denizens of a "fragmented world."

"Our business works with clients of very different types – from multinationals to private freelancers," explains Gaëlle Vallée, Operational Data Mining Team Manager at the OBS Corporate Mobile Affairs Unit. "Added to this constraint are the breadth of our service packages and a world of constantly increasing competition."

In response to those challenges, OBS implemented a far-reaching project, christened "One CRM," to gain greater insight into clients and better understand their expectations. The reward of those efforts would be cost savings through smarter, more efficient and more effective multichannel sales and marketing efforts.

The project
OBS put what would become One CRM into motion by first assessing both its operational capabilities, such as front-office staff in direct contact with the customer, as well as its analytical capabilities, such as market insight.

Next, OBS addressed the customer relations cycle: from acquiring clients all the way through developing business proposals to customer reward programs.

"We sought to understand how the CRM solution could affect this cycle," Vallée explains. "The objective was to earn the trust and appreciation of new clients through proactivity and relevant offers."

Specifically, OBS learned it needed a CRM solution to manage campaigns to win back, retain, acquire and anticipate the needs of clients – particularly to avoid churn by detecting and correcting dissatisfaction.

The solution
OBS drew a functional map of the CRM solution it needed. And it organized end-to-end data collection to support the front office, from sales to customer service and through to billing.

"By focusing on these two cross-cutting areas, we built our business data warehouse over about three years," Vallée says.

After creating an analytical view of customers and products, OBS built functionality for tracking sales and campaign effectiveness based on customer appeal scores. The result was rich, though highly complex, models.

"So as not to lose out on responsiveness, we built an additional layer: a data mart," Vallée says. "Based on internal and external sources, this provides faster access to information."

With its 500 precalculated indicators - including marketing analysis, pricing, customer segmentation, sales reporting, budget forecasting and more – the data mart allows OBS to measure marketing performance in relation to clients.

"Functional users enjoy increased freedom and flexibility, since users are no longer limited by technical constraints," Vallée says.

ROI: quantitative and qualitative
"Today, our CRM solution delivers all of the information needed by all of our sales forces," Vallée says. "It allows us to understand and anticipate a market that is constantly evolving through innovation, such as with the recent wave of ultramobility.

"It covers both strategic analysis and its operational variant," Vallée adds. "With productivity up by more than 30 percent and the achievement of optimal information freshness, our CRM solution has enabled us to reach our targets for responsiveness and proactivity in relation to our market."

OBS has rolled out the solution in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and Egypt. A similar model, adapted for less mature markets, will roll out in other regions.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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