How One Major Telecom Employs EP to Get Personal with Subscribers

Telecommunications provider Turkcell achieved real-time customer experience management for its millions of subscribers. Faced with challenges in managing the transactions and interactions of all of its customers, Turkcell sought a solution that would provide the necessary real-time insights to address them. By implementing a complex event processing (CEP) platform, Turkcell successfully increased revenue, reduced marketing campaign cycle time, and increased customer loyalty and retention.

Mobile telecommunications providers are important to today’s highly mobile public. At the same time, the providers face a major competitive challenge. This challenge has arisen out of the price-based competition prevalent for the past several years. The result is, consumers consider one mobile service provider pretty much the same as another, with buying decisions based largely on price. It is estimated that 20 to 40 percent of customers move to new providers each year, making customer “churn” (i.e, turnover) a serious concern.

While subscriber loss is one challenge, revenue growth is another. In a commoditized market, it is a challenge to find new customers. Fortunately, CEP provides a solution by enabling telcos to perform real-time customer experience management for their subscribers to reduce churn and increase revenues.

CEP helps companies manage the hundreds of thousands of transactions passing through a central telco network that serves millions of subscribers. CEP allows the telco’s existing applications to consume these transactions and then transform them into a series of subscriber preferences or events. By identifying and correlating particular sequences of events that indicate a change in the customer’s routine into a series of predefined criteria, telcos can then take the next best action in real-time.

One telco that is working on creating a more personalized, real-time marketing and customer service system is Turkcell, a mobile telco in Turkey with 34 million subscribers. Turkcell implemented Progress Software‘s Apama event processing engine to analyze customers’ usage patterns on the network and quickly respond to them.

The event processing engine sends highly targeted offers when it sees certain usage patterns. The system correlates more than a million subscriber preferences per hour by using more than 200 different criteria. These might include an alert to a pay-as-you-go subscriber that he or she is running low on credit or a promotion at a local restaurant sent shortly before lunchtime. By sending these promotions in response to real-time events, Turkcell reports achieving a ten-fold increase in positive responses compared to previous efforts (which included sending a promotion with the monthly invoice). Overall, Turkcell successfully increased revenue, reduced marketing campaign cycle time from days to minutes, and increased customer satisfaction and retention rates.

The key reasons why these promotions worked are relevancy and timeliness. Delivering something of interest to subscribers at a time when they are most likely to be interested in it helps to increase the response rate.

Turkcell is far more relevant to its customers because it is able to respond to their individual preferences and behaviors. By sending out promotions tailored to each subscriber’s location, previous purchasing patterns and time of day, Turkcell is providing something that other telcos cannot. As Turkcell’s experience shows, organizations no longer have to be faceless entities. By using real-time analysis of social media and other customer preferences and behavior patterns, organizations can do targeted, location-based promotions and improve customer engagement in the process.