|
 |  |
 |
 Overview Success Stories
|  |
T-Mobile Austria Gets Maximum Market Leverage with Chordiant Marketing Director 
In the mobile communications market, euphoria has given way to sober realism. Telcos are fighting tooth and nail for every last customer to avoid being left behind in the competitive race. So it is no wonder that so many companies agonize over the fickle way in which mobile users flit from provider to provider. However, not so at Austrian mobile network pioneer T-Mobile Austria, wholly owned subsidiary of German telco T-Mobile, where customer orientation has been fueling growth consistently for more than five years. Underpinning this consistent surge is the marketing solution from Chordiant Software.
The recent boom in mobile phones far outstripped anything the Internet had to offer, giving mobile network providers a bonanza of hundreds of thousands of new users a year. With the years of plenty now at an end, however, the industry is nursing its hangover: customer churn is frighteningly high, and attractive pricing models are no longer a viable means of differentiation. The only way for telcos to get the edge on the competition is to place the customer squarely in the middle of everything they do and to cultivate long-term, profitable relationships. Take T-Mobile Austria, for instance. The strength of the Austrian GSM network operator lies not only in its mobile network: it also gets top grades for the way it handles customers.
The best means of defense …Just two years after its market launch, T-Mobile Austria became the first Austrian mobile network provider to introduce an extensive customer loyalty program - dubbed "mäxchen" - in September 1998. Anyone who makes frequent calls on the T-Mobile Austria network quickly runs up a lot of bonus points. And, since studies have found that new mobiles are one of the main reasons why customers switch providers, T-Mobile Austria offers new mobile devices (among other things) at low prices in return for a certain number of bonus points - even without contracts. For people in the company's biggest customer group (prepaid customers) who spend a lot of time on the phone, T-Mobile Austria also launched the separate "kläxchen" loyalty system in October 2000. The success of these sales promotion campaigns speaks for itself: three-quarters of all customers who have contracts take part in the mäxchen scheme. And more than ten percent of the firm's prepaid customers signed up for the new bonus program within three months of kläxchen's debut. It seems that T-Mobile Austria can indeed rely on the loyalty of its customers. Of all the Austrian mobile network providers, T-Mobile Austria has the lowest rate of customer churn rate. The right offers at the right time For T-Mobile Austria, customer orientation is not confined to bonus systems: it also means tailor-made offerings. The Austrian provider offers a wide range of tariffs for prepaid, contract and business customers, plus add-ons such as WAP- or GPRS-based online services and digital answering services for retail customers. Customers can get virtually any package they want. All the same, even the most innovative loyalty programs and intelligent offerings are of little use if they are not presented to the right people at the right time using the right medium. That is why T-Mobile Austria laid the foundation for its customer-oriented communication - a data warehouse with detailed, up-to-date information about customers and products - back in early 1997. Digging for gold The difficult thing was putting all this valuable data to good use in targeted marketing campaigns. "We don't want to send all the information we have to every customer," explains Harald Mühlbacher, the man in charge of customer analysis at T-Mobile Austria "If, like us, you tailor your offerings to very specific target groups, you want to be sure you are hitting the right people. Otherwise the whole thing doesn't make sense." The company was already using a data mining tool to analyze the data. But the selection criteria to define the segments for individual marketing campaigns and apply these to the customer base had to be entered by hand. "When you run a lot of campaigns with completely different target groups, that adds up to a lot of work and is very time-consuming," Mühlbacher recalls. To simplify and speed up its direct marketing activities, the company therefore started looking around for intelligent marketing automation software. Wanted: a marketing specialist When T-Mobile Austria began examining the market for campaign management tools in early 1999, the number of suppliers was very limited. "To begin with we came across two firms: Chordiant - still called PrimeResponse at the time - and Exchange Applications," Mühlbacher continues. "We then talked to a series of other software houses, but none of them had a really specialized marketing product to show." The mobile network provider did not take its decision lightly, putting together a comprehensive catalog of criteria including technical specifications from the IT department and functional requirements defined by Marketing. The solutions from Chordiant and Exchange Applications were investigated meticulously, point by point. At the same time, T-Mobile Austria also had a close look at a marketing tool from Intrinsic. Convincing functionality The Chordiant solution was the only one that had all the required functionality. Yet even this tool was not perfect. But while the evaluation was in progress, Chordiant was already busy building a new graphical user interface that would make the software far more friendly and intuitive to use. "We made the decision to go with Chordiant although the interface was still not ready: it was the breadth of functionality that clinched it for us," says Mühlbacher, explaining what motivated the choice. "The crucial thing for us was that the Chordiant tool enabled us to target multi-level marketing campaigns at differing customer segments via a wide range of delivery channels, including the Web, e-mail and SMS. Up till then, such an approach would have been inconceivable." Green light for effective campaign management The project to implement the Chordiant marketing solution got underway at the start of 2000. Between four and six people from T-Mobile Austria's IT and marketing departments and two Chordiant consultants spent several months crafting the data model, mapping the data and structuring a number of campaigns that were already highly complex. This gave the team the chance to put the application's extensive functionality to a rigorous practical test. At the same time, the staff of T-Mobile Austria were trained to handle the marketing software independently. By October 2000, the first round of multi-level, target group-specific campaigns were ready to roll. The first few concentrated very heavily on direct mailshots and telephone marketing. Since then, e-mail, Web and SMS campaigns have also been phased in. Thanks to the solution from Chordiant, this kind of cross-media marketing is no longer a problem. The tool supports the full range of communication channels and can integrate any or all of them in a given campaign - making sure that every T-Mobile Austria customer is targeted via their preferred medium. A rewarding investment For T-Mobile Austria, the Chordiant solution proved to be money well spent. The number of direct mailshots sent out to hundreds of thousands of customers has been reduced dramatically. 2001 was the first year in which the software was fully deployed. And in this time, T-Mobile Austria was able to save twice as much money as it had spent on the solution in the first place. Today, a large number of smaller-scale campaigns communicate specially tailored messages to specific customer segments. These personalized campaigns focus strongly on what individual customers want and need - and elicit significantly higher response rates. Even so, mass mailings have not disappeared from T-Mobile Austria's agenda altogether. "I have no problem with direct mails for very large groups when we want to pass on general information," Mühlbacher stresses. "But it is a rare occurrence for us to send a standard letter to all our two million or more mobile phone users." Finely tuned communication Because customer orientation is so central to what T-Mobile Austria is and does, its products and brands are as varied as the consumer groups it targets. But that was not always the case. "It was only when we introduced the Chordiant solution that we were able to fine-tune our service offerings in so many ways," says Mühlbacher. With the campaign management software from Chordiant well established, all these different product variants can now be marketed without the need for more time or organizational preparations. On the contrary: automated processes today enable marketing campaigns to be planned, designed and implemented far more quickly. The Austrian mobile network provider can thus respond swiftly to market trends and incorporate these themes in its communication with customers. Harald Mühlbacher is evidently well satisfied with the success of the company's strategy: "Staying a nose ahead is obviously very important in this business. The Chordiant tool has effectively enabled us to exploit a first-mover advantage." Based partly on the success of the T-Mobile Austria implementation, Chordiant Marketing Director has been selected as the operational business process and marketing automation solution for T-Mobile subsidiaries in a number of other European countries as well as the US. |  | |
 |
| © 2000-2008, Chordiant Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Legal/Disclaimer | Privacy Policy | Site Map | |  |
| Solutions | Retail Banking | Card Services | Lending | Insurance | Telecommunications | News & Events | About Chordiant | |
