Transformation Benefits Company and Customers

Polish Telecommunications Giant Calls on SAS

For years, Poland's telecommunications leader Telekomunikacja Polska S.A. (TP), maintained monopolistic control over the country's telecommunications market. But a new law, passed in May 2000, opened local markets to competition in 2002 and opened international markets in 2003. This liberalization of the markets prompted TP to transition its technology-focused organization into a more customer-oriented culture. As part of that change, TP has built a SAS-based customer database that provides a better understanding of customers, improves customer accessibility to services and increases the diversity of customers.

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about Telekomunikacja Polska and its successes with SAS.

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Customer ViewPoint
You have questions; our customers have answers. Check out this video Q& A.

Piotr Górny
Manager, MIS Department
Polish Telecom

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Jerzy Nagórski
Director of Market Segments
Polish Telecom

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Luiza Warno
MIS Director
Polish Telecom

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In June 2003 at SAS' annual European business intelligence event, Telekomunikacja Polska earned an Enterprise Intelligence Award for their achievements in creating a solid, end-to-end Intelligence Architecture upon which reliable solution areas can be built, such as customer intelligence and financial intelligence solutions. In doing so, TP is positioning itself to be increasingly competitive across neighboring markets in Europe.

Luiza Warno, who heads the development of management information systems at TP says SAS has helped the company remain competitive while adjusting to the realities of a new marketplace. "Because the telecom market in Poland is changing, it means there will be new providers of services and growing competition. So churn analysis and other forms of customer intelligence that allow us to predict customer behavior will help us keep our best customers. We're accomplishing this with SAS software, one of the most important technology implementations at TP."

Today, TP still dominates the largest telecommunications market in Central Europe, with nearly 90 percent market share of Poland's fixed line business and PTK Centertel, a mobile operator and a member of TP Capital Group, with 34 percent share of its mobile market. But now the company's success is based on customer choice, not control. "We want the customer to choose our services not because we are the only one to serve the customer but because it is his informed decision to receive our services," says Warno. "So now all of our activity is customer oriented."

A Unified Customer View
Warno and other executives at TP knew that creating a new customer-oriented culture would require more than changed employee attitudes and improved customer service. "It also involves implementing appropriate systems that provide customer knowledge," she says.

With 36,000 employees dispersed throughout Poland, TP traditionally maintained customer information in a dozen different locations and stored that data within four unique billing systems.

"Because the budget was divided between all those different sections, our view of the customer was distributed and spread among numerous departments," explains Warno. "To gather that information in one place and arrange it into a unified view of the customer was an enormous task."

But SAS was up to the task, helping TP build one of the most impressive data warehouses in Europe. The centrally managed warehouse combines 13 months of billing information and usage reports on nearly 11 million customers.

Promoting Products, Combating Churn
"That is a tremendous amount of data and a lot of knowledge on which to design your business," says Jerzy Nagorski, marketing director at TP. "With SAS, we can even make predictions one year in advance and design offers that take all the factors into consideration."

When Jerzy and other business managers at TP want to know more about their customers, they turn to Piotr Gorny, who heads application development and uses SAS to find their answers.

"Recently, there are more and more questions concerning the analysis of introducing new products," says Gorny. "So before a new product is introduced by business, they ask us to predict its profitability and also to find a customer segment for that product." Gorny and his team use SAS to segment customers into various groups and to predict which customers are likely to respond to which new promotions.

Perhaps more important than predicting customer responsiveness to promotions, TP also uses SAS to predict churn – forecasting which customers are likely to cancel services, and then determining how to convince the best customers to stay.

"Churn is an important issue, because many of the customers likely to churn are our best customers, and they have the most impact on the business' future success," says Jerzy. The company's churn solution helps TP compete in Poland's expanding and aggressive telecommunications market.

A Longstanding Relationship
Telekomunikacja Polska and SAS have a long history of collaboration, and SAS' knowledge of the telecommunications sector has been an important benefit. "I think the success of this solution was based on the knowledge of the SAS employees and consultants who provided enormous insight into the telecommunications industry and the telecom business processes," says Warno. "Using their knowledge and skills, they were able to meet our needs, as well as the business units' needs."

While Warno says return on investment figures are still being calculated, she asserts the SAS solutions already have provided a savings of three times the initial investment. "So, we can say that the existence of these systems is clearly profitable for our company. I think that is a great success. If the trend is going to be maintained, we need to develop more of theses kinds of implementations and work closer with SAS Institute from a business point of view."

With their end-to-end SAS solution, executives at TP have confidence that their decisions are based on solid customer intelligence – a benefit that will help them remain Poland's number one telecommunications company, even in an increasingly competitive environment.

"Access to information provides more modern and better management," says Warno. "And a company that has systematic and reliable access to information has a huge advantage. I'm convinced that over the last year, SAS really has helped increase customer satisfaction, and I think further cooperation with SAS will no doubt bring continued and increasing customer satisfaction."

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