Tianjin Unicom Increases Telesales fivefold with SAS®

Tianjin Unicom partners with SAS

Competition in the telecommunications industry is getting fiercer with time. New and better services are introduced with increasing frequency. Thus, to get ahead of the competition, companies often make hasty decisions or decisions that lack solid marketing basis, ultimately resulting in a "price war." In his recent speech, Wu Jichuan, the former head of the Ministry of Information Industry and now deputy director of the Education, Science, Culture & Health Committee of NPC (the National People's Congress), denounced this price war and, justifiably, drew attention to the growing severity of the problem.

One company affected by this increased scrutiny was Tianjin Unicom, a branch of the China Unicom group. After the group was listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it came under pressure from international investors to raise its management standard, improve the extent of globalization and pursue better profitability. Responding to the pressure, Tianjin Unicom began searching for a way to incorporate advanced solutions and service systems to raise or improve its management standard.

After extensive research, Tianjin Unicom discovered that the functional modules of SAS products possessed the widest industry interoperability, a fact supported by SAS' impressive list of clients spanning the global market. In addition, SAS maintains strong cooperative relationships with telecom operators in Shanghai, Beijing, Zhejiang and Hebei, underscoring the company's understanding of the customized needs of domestic clients.

It is this international experience, coupled with local expertise, that led Tianjin Unicom to partner with SAS. Moreover, since Tianjin Unicom believes that only large corporations with relevant qualifications can be relied upon to deal effectively with market intelligence solutions and vital business data, SAS was the obvious choice.

Data mining intensifies marketing
Extensive marketing is no longer enough to ensure positive returns from China's telecom market today. Intensive and scientific marketing is the only way to achieve sustainable results. But companies need an intelligence support system to embark in modern marketing techniques.

Tianjin Unicom selected three components of SAS Customer Intelligence for Telecommunications: SAS Customer Retention for Telecommunications, SAS Customer Segmentation for Telecommunications, and SAS Cross-Selling and Up-Sell for Telecommunications. With these three modules in place, Tianjin Unicom is equipped with the business intelligence technology to address three important decision-making issues:

• Predict which customers are most likely to churn; determine key factors that affect customer decisions; identify customers at risk of leaving by developing customer churn indexes; and take necessary steps to retain customers before they leave.
• Classify customers according to their possible behaviors and potential buying habits; provide more accurate understanding of product portfolios, product introductions and service packages.
• Identify existing customers who are likely to respond to cross-selling and up-selling offers; evaluate the historical purchasing mode of each customer; predict what the customer is likely to purchase in the next step.

With the SAS solutions up and running, Tianjin Unicom has seen dramatic results, including:

• Implementing a more intensive marketing strategy.
• Retaining the most profitable customers.
• Developing new businesses that are more tailored to the market demands.
• Raising the ARPU (average revenue per user) and enhancing its profitability.

"SAS helps us to identify the hazards and opportunities via data mining. It makes our marketing more insightful, accurate and rapid," says Mr. Tianlong, data mining project manager.

Concrete breakthroughs have been made in all marketing areas. For instance, Tianjin Unicom's successful telesales rate rose from 40 to 200 per 1,000 calls, indicating a rise from 4 percent to 20 percent success.

The company also became aware of perceived changes from customers. A veteran user with a connection record spanning four years and monthly consumption of more than RMB 500 yuan commented, "We saw our value as veteran users through the customer care program of Tianjin Unicom. I would advise anyone who asks me to choose Tianjin Unicom."

SAS makes a difference
SAS' service teams have made interaction with Tianjin Unicom a very pleasant experience. In the past five years, SAS has been involved in establishing service teams all across China. Two of the teams are particularly well-established: the technical support and localization development team and the sales team involved in customer relationship management and commercial intelligence analysis.

According to Tianlong, the technicians from SAS were competent and well experienced in telecom fields. "They are able to find out useful information from the complicated data and present this to us using graphics. It becomes easy to understand and helps us make decisions. They are also top-ranking project managers. They deliver the system to you in a clear and structured manner. They also trained our engineers in a very systematic way," comments Tianlong.

Trained by the SAS service team, Tianjin Unicom's engineers are now armed with the skills for operating the system independently and sifting through the voluminous data to find out the information that they need.

This successful working partnership also proves that integrating consultation, service and training into one whole package meets a customer's long-term interests better than any single product sales mode can.

In addition, SAS possesses telecom-specific data structures, experienced telecom experts and proven analysis capabilities. All these factors result in a highly successful intelligence management system for Tianjin Unicom.

Lowering the cost of ownership
The larger the enterprise, the higher the decision-making costs. A single bad decision may result in loss of millions or even billions of dollars. Therefore, it is vital that large enterprises lower the risk and cost of decision making. Armed with SAS Business Intelligence, customers can improve profitability as well as reduce the risk of making wrong decisions, allowing them to shift from subjective decision making to a data-based process. The system provides the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) with its high scalability that not only satisfies customers' current needs, but also future needs as customers increase the number of users or the scale of the business.

Copyright © SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved.