SAS REVEALS CHURN MANAGEMENT SOLUTION FOR TELECOMS

SAS Institute announced a solution that will help telecommunications companies reduce customer defection, known in the telecommunications industry as "churn." The Churn Management Solution for Telecommunications -- announced at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference & Exhibition -- is the first offering from SAS Institute's CRM Knowledge Solution Series (CKSS). The series will consist of industry and application-specific solutions that offer marketing professionals results on some of their most pressing customer relationship management issues. The series will be expanded to include solutions for fraud detection and cross selling.

The Churn Management Solution for Telecommunications helps companies predict which customers are likely to leave so that they can take early appropriate action to retain valuable customers. SAS Institute is the first software vendor to offer an integrated churn management solution that supports the whole process of managing churn -- from gathering and warehousing data, to predictive churn modeling, to distributing the results via a range of media, including corporate intranets and portals.

"Churn costs European and U.S. telecommunications companies an estimated 4 billion dollars each year," said Jim Davis, SAS Institute's global IT strategist. "With annual churn rates of around 25 to 30 percent, it typically takes three years and costs up to $700 in Europe for a telecommunications company to replace each lost customer with a new one. Clearly, a solution that lets organizations reverse churn can contribute directly, and considerably, to a telco's ability to survive in today's deregulated and highly competitive telecommunications industry."

At the core of the Churn Management Solution will be SAS Institute's technologies for data warehousing and Enterprise Miner software for data mining. Data warehousing is used to gather data relating to churn from an organization's operational systems, such as networking and billing, and organize it into a form suitable for analysis. Data mining helps organizations identify their profitable customers and the kinds of products and services they want to buy.

The solution includes a template that is based on SAS Institute's data-mining methodology (a step-by-step approach to structuring a data mining project), but adapted specifically for managing churn, allowing marketing professionals to achieve a very rapid return on the application of data mining techniques to churn. The solution will also include a Rapid Result Service, through which SAS Institute, together with the customer, work on a focused project to access customer data, predict who is likely to churn, assess their value to the organization, and give insights into what is driving their decisions. This service is designed to deliver actionable results within two to six weeks. The Rapid Results service includes a Best Practice Paper on churn that provides a step-by-step guide to managing churn based on SAS Institute's extensive experience with telecommunications companies. SAS software is used by virtually all of the top 20 international telecommunications companies worldwide, including AT&T, Sprint, and U S WEST in the United States; France Telecom, Telecom Italia, and Belgacom in Europe; and Hong Kong Telecom and China Telecom in Asia.

"Other churn solutions focus solely on churn modeling and are so-called 'black-box' solutions where the customer is forced to adopt predefined models," said Adrian Reynolds, CRM program manager for SAS Institute's Europe Middle East Asia region. "Clearly, in the long term, these solutions will restrict the building of competitive advantage, since they are not adaptable to the customer's individual requirements. The advantage of the SAS solution is first that it encompasses the whole churn management process and second, that it is structured so that it offers a high level of adaptability that does not sacrifice rapid implementation time."

For more information, visit http://www.sas.com/.