Customer Challenge
This telecommunications service provider sought to enhance its collections process to proactively address late payments and foster stronger customer relationships. The company aimed to leverage its extensive customer data and adopt a more personalized and efficient approach to communication and outreach.
Specifically, the company wanted to:
- Proactively identify customers at risk of late payment: Utilize data-driven insights to predict potential payment issues and intervene early.
- Personalize communication strategies: Tailor communication to individual customers based on their payment behavior and preferences, ensuring relevant and effective outreach.
- Automate multi-channel communication: Streamline and automate communication across various channels (e.g., SMS, email, call center) to improve efficiency and reach customers in an efficient way.
- Enhance customer experience: Maintain positive customer relationships throughout the collections process by providing clear, transparent, and timely communication.
By achieving these goals, our customer aimed to improve collections performance, reduce churn, and ultimately drive customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Partner Solution
Strata, an AWS Advanced Partner, developed a tailored campaign solution to address these challenges. The solution leverages a combination of AWS services and SAS Customer Intelligence tools:
- Machine Learning (ML): The solution utilizes ML models on AWS to analyze customer data and generate churn propensity scores, enabling identification of customers likely to miss payments.
- Personalized Communication: Based on these scores, the solution segments customers and tailors communication strategies accordingly, utilizing SMS, email, and call center outreach.
- Automation: AWS services like SQS, SES, Lambda, Glue Jobs, API Gateway, and S3 were used to facilitate the mentioned channels and to work together with SAS to automate communication workflows, ensuring timely and relevant outreach while reducing manual effort.
- Monitoring: Amazon QuickSight dashboards provide insights into campaign performance, allowing for data-driven optimization and continuous improvement.
- Data Integration and Storage: Amazon S3 and Oracle RDS store and manage the data required for campaign execution and reporting, ensuring data consistency and integrity.
Strata’s solution not only addresses the technical challenges but also provides ongoing support and maintenance, ensuring the solution’s continued effectiveness and adaptability to the evolving needs of the telecommunications provider.
Results and Benefits
The implemented solution has yielded significant benefits for the telecommunications provider:
- Improved Collections Performance: By proactively identifying and engaging with at-risk customers, the company has reduced bad debt by 13% within the first five months, impacting involuntary churn for subscription base customers
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Personalized and timely communication has led to a more positive customer experience, fostering stronger relationships and reducing churn.
- Increased Operational Efficiency: Automation has streamlined the collections process, reducing manual effort and allowing the team to focus on more strategic tasks. Specifically, the intelligent targeting of communication efforts has enabled a more focused approach on high-value customers, leading to a nearly 20% reduction in contact center operational costs related to collections.
- Data-Driven Insights: Reporting and analytics empower the company to make data-driven decisions, continuously refining their campaign strategies for optimal results.
Why Strata?
Strata was selected as the implementation partner due to their:
Deep AWS Expertise: Strata’s extensive experience with AWS services and their status as an AWS Advanced Partner ensured a smooth and efficient implementation process.
Telecommunications Industry Knowledge: Strata’s deep understanding of the telecommunications industry, combined with their expertise in SAS Campaign Management, allowed them to tailor the solution to the specific needs and challenges of the provider.
Proven Success with the Client: Strata had previously collaborated with the customer on successful marketing automation projects, establishing trust and a strong working relationship.
Real-Time Campaign Expertise: Strata’s experience with real-time campaign automation and machine learning applications was crucial for implementing the solution’s advanced targeting and personalization features.
Ongoing Support and Maintenance: Strata’s commitment to providing ongoing support and maintenance ensured that the solution would continue to deliver value and adapt to the evolving needs of the telecommunications provider.
By combining AWS’s powerful cloud infrastructure with Strata’s expertise in telecommunications and campaign automation, the customer was able to implement a highly effective, scalable, and secure solution that significantly improved their collections process and customer engagement.