Mobilink Dials in Churn Reduction with KXEN’s InfiniteInsight™

November 8, 2011

Tools

800% improvement in campaign response rates

A customer-centric strategy boosts customer happiness

Identifying the next-best activity increases profitability

Social network analysis is critical to better targeting

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- KXEN, the leading provider of predictive analytics for business users, announced that Mobilink, Pakistan’s leading cellular and Blackberry service provider, reduced churn, improved campaign response rates and enhanced cross-sell and up-sell thanks to an innovative program founded on predictive analytics and focused on customer needs.

Mobilink used InfiniteInsight™, KXEN's flagship product, to personalize customer relationships, while taking advantage of the most appropriate communications channel, including SMS text and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). "With InfiniteInsight™, we were able to build customer trust, enhance revenues and at the same time improve loyalty," said Ehtisham Rao, Director of Business Intelligence and Billing. "InfiniteInsight™ gives us the agility we need to respond to a very dynamic market."

The exceptional results achieved in the area of business and predictive analytics led executives to recognize Rao's team as "Best Team of the Year."

Founded by Motorola in 1994 as Pakistan's first mobile communications service, Mobilink, now owned by Orascom Telecom, continues to be the market leader. The communications powerhouse boasts a subscriber base of nearly 32 million. Its 32,500 sales people serve 200,000 retailers in more than 10,000 cities, towns, and villages across the country.

During the last decade, however, competition in Pakistan's communications market has intensified as mobile usage exploded. Average revenue per user (ARPU) plummeted. Churn became a significant challenge as the market expanded twenty-fold.

In response, Mobilink invested in a complete analytic environment. By applying advanced data mining techniques such as predictive analytics, the company was able to maintain its competitive edge. Specifically, predictive analytics allowed Mobilink to successfully optimize the customer life cycle, minimize churn, and identify opportunities for cross-sell and up-sell.

Mobilink chose to standardize on InfiniteInsight™ after examining solutions from other vendors such as SAS and SPSS, because of its excellent predictive capabilities, ease of use, rapid deployment, and compatibility with other solutions. For example, predictive scores are applied directly in-database to a Teradata environment that is integrated with Informatica and Microstrategy.

Thanks to the in-depth insight provided by InfiniteInsight™, Mobilink revamped its retention strategy and began focusing not only on predicting churn, but preventing it. The new strategy calls for offering the right incentive to the right customer at the right time -- an approach known as the "next best activity". For example, it makes sense to offer a higher-income customer with a smart phone music credits rather than five free minutes of calling time. Today, using InfiniteInsight™, Mobilink is able to determine that 50% of potential churners come from a small group of subscribers representing about 10 percent of the total customer base, considerably limiting the total number of customers they need to target in churn campaigns.

Mirza Yousaf, Assistant Manager of Advanced Analytics, said he looked at how customers in different income brackets behave in different regions, and also how they respond to different packages. Using InfiniteInsight™, he has been able to distill down over 1,100 variables to determine those that are most predictive for each customer segment and sub-segment. "We achieved tremendous results," Yousaf said. “Not only has churn decreased, but the uptake of marketing campaigns has soared eight-fold, from .5% to about 4%.”

"InfiniteInsight™ really opened our eyes to the power of our data," says Rao. “We are able to optimize customer interactions at every point in the customer lifecycle thanks to the power of InfiniteInsight™. Analysts are able to build new predictive models in less than a day and retrain them on the latest data in just a few hours.” In the past, it would have taken weeks or months to get equivalent results using traditional data mining tools.

According to Rao, InfiniteInsight™’s automated approach dramatically increases analyst productivity. By simplifying the complex modeling process and providing intuitive reporting, InfiniteInsight™ also improves communication between analysts and business users, who are laser focused on operating results.

"InfiniteInsight™ is not only easier to use and faster at delivering results than traditional data mining tools like SAS and SPSS, InfiniteInsight™ also delivers superior models,” says Rao. “The difference is that with InfiniteInsight™ you can introduce much wider data sets in the analysis so that you end up building more accurate predictive models. And because InfiniteInsight™ can retrain our models so quickly, we never have to be satisfied with old, out-of-date models. This level of speed and agility is mission-critical in today's fast-paced, socially-networked world.”

In addition to its churn-reduction efforts, Rao’s team recently launched a pioneering social network analysis project using InfiniteInsight™ Social that will make it possible to target influencers with viral offers, essentially converting them into brand ambassadors. "InfiniteInsight™ Social reveals the relationships that our customers have with other people in their social network – both Mobilink customers and non-customers – and that's the key to better targeting and viral marketing," Rao said.

“We are pleased with Mobilink’s success with InfiniteInsight™. Mobilink has demonstrated how the use of advanced analytics and data mining techniques have provided a competitive advantage and contributed to their market leadership,” said John Ball, Chief Executive Offer of KXEN. “We are committed to achieving real business results with our communications industry customers and driving innovation across the customer lifecycle with predictive analytics.”

Supporting Resources

For more information, please visit http://www.kxen.com.

About Mobilink

Pakistan Mobile Communications Limited, better known as Mobilink GSM is Pakistan's oldest and largest mobile carrier. A communications powerhouse, with annual revenues of more than $1 billion, Mobilink boasts a subscriber base of nearly 32 million. Its 32,500 sales people serve 200,000 retailers in more than 10,000 cities, towns, and villages across the country. In addition to cellular service, Mobilink offers DSL broadband through a wholly owned subsidiary and wireless broadband. It is headquartered in Islamabad.

About KXEN

KXEN is revolutionizing the way companies predictive analytics to make better decisions. Based on patented innovations, the company's flagship product, InfiniteInsight™, delivers orders of magnitude improvements in speed and agility to optimize every step in the customer lifecycle – including acquisition, cross-sell, up-sell, retention and next best activity. Proven with over 400 deployments at companies such as Bank of America, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Lowe’s, Meredith Corporation, Rogers, and Vodafone, KXEN solutions deliver predictive power and infinite insight™. KXEN is headquartered in San Francisco, California with field offices in the U.S., Paris and London.