Telstra Mobile Combats Churn with SAS^®

As Australia's largest mobile service provider, Telstra Mobile is reliant on highly effective churn management.

In most industries the cost of retaining a customer, subscriber or client is substantially less than the initial cost of obtaining that customer. Protecting this investment is the essence of churn management. It really boils down to understanding customers – what they want now and what they're likely to want in the future, according to SAS.

"With SAS® Enterprise Miner^TM  we can examine customer behavior on historical and predictive levels, which can then show us what 'group' of customers are likely to churn and the causes," says Trish Berendsen, Telstra Mobile's head of Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Return on Investment
With the SAS solution, Telstra Mobile is able to capitalise fully on data that exists across the entire Telstra enterprise. "SAS Enterprise Miner enables us to work effectively with data and build models that relate to customer behavior," Berendsen explains. "Essentially, our ability to use data mining capabilities from SAS means we've been able to adopt a much more proactive approach to churn management and it's an approach that has already resulted in multimillion-dollar benefits."

These capabilities were particularly critical during the lead up to the introduction of mobile number portability within Australia. Using SAS Enterprise Miner, Telstra Mobile was able to develop an effective and accurately targeted customer retention campaign. This also provided customer loyalty benefits resulting in continued service provision from Telstra Mobile.

More Targeted Marketing
The predictive ability of the SAS Enterprise Miner solution within Telstra Mobile gives CRM staff the opportunity to work with product and service units in developing new strategies. It also assists in identifying customers or customer groups that need to be informed of new services.

SAS Enterprise Miner saves organizations days, if not weeks, in developing churn management models. And every day saved is an extra day that customers can devote to developing the strategies that will meet the needs of their customers and thereby protect their investment, according to SAS.

SAS® Technology Used
Underpinning Telstra Mobile's effective and rapid churn management success is the ability of SAS Enterprise Miner to access and leverage data from Telstra's core systems such as billing, demographics and usage, then deliver meaningful information to CRM staff. "Data is regarded as one of the most valuable Telstra resources," Berendsen says. "With SAS Enterprise Miner, we're able to mine that data and leverage its true value at an enormous number of levels."

The Partnership
Solutions that assist in addressing churn demand a level of sophistication that for Telstra Mobile is best delivered by SAS Enterprise Miner. "Telecommunications is an extremely competitive market and any core software that we implement must be nothing less than best-of-breed. The SAS Enterprise Miner utility has demonstrated to us that the partnership is critical in our efforts to address churn," Berendsen concludes.

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