Communication enterprises are under intense competition to secure customer loyalty and build greater profitability. Amdocs, a global leader in billing systems, customer care, and support has shifted its strategy, creating a more integrated, customer-centric solution designed to give communication service providers (CSP) a greater competitive edge. Its reinvented portfolio is designed to create an "intentional customer experience," bringing a point of differentiation to the customer life cycle. Amdoc's new strategy involves consultancy services, a unified software platform, and partnerships with industry leaders and it has established a series of new relationships to provide billing and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to telecommunication companies.
Part three of the Amdocs Overhauls Its Marketing series.
In addition to its new partnership with IBM, (See Part Two) in mid-February, Amdocs and SAS Institute, the world's leader in business intelligence (BI) software, announced that they have formed a global strategic alliance to deliver advanced marketing automation (MA) and decision-centric BI solutions to CSPs. Together, the two companies pledge to enable CSPs to better track and analyze valuable customer data and dynamically present the resulting intelligence via operational systems, such as billing, call center, and ordering.
User companies should thus benefit from advanced customer and market segmentation (a marketing strategy in which the total market is disaggregated into submarkets, or segments, sharing some measurable characteristic based on demographics, psychographics, lifestyle, geography, benefits, etc.), rapid deployment of one-to-one marketing campaigns (a marketing strategy for sending a particular message to a single customer, often assisted by a marketing database) and improved product lifecycle management (PLM) will possibly reduce operating costs, enhance customer loyalty and lifetime value, and increase profitability.
Through a suite of joint solutions, Amdocs' telecommunications industry expertise and established operational applications, coupled with SAS' predictive analytics and profitability software, customers should benefit from a combination of strong analytical software, business consulting, and implementation services, allowing them to unlock valuable intelligence from underlying operational systems.
Available immediately, the first offering from Amdocs and SAS is the Customer Profitability and Segmentation solution, which should allow CSPs to understand the costs associated with doing business with their customers. It will enable them to gain vital insight into their customers' behavioral drivers, and to use that knowledge to make business decisions. Ultimately, this solutions aims to maximize customer profitability and create a highly personalized and differentiated customer experience. Other solutions, such as churn management and predictive modeling, will be rolled out in a foreseeable future.
The product marketing and development deal lets SAS take over the support of Amdocs' current marketing campaign management application, which is largely based on the technology acquired by Amdocs from its acquisition of Xchange. Consequently, Amdocs will encourage its few dozen campaign management customers to migrate to SAS' Marketing Automation 4 offering. Existing Amdocs customers of other modules that were built based on Xchange, including Amdocs Opportunity Advisor, will not benefit much from this partnership, although they will continue to be supported.
Bundled with that, these customers will also be offered access to the SAS Telecommunications Intelligence Solutions, the company's set of prepackaged applications tailored to meet the distinctive needs of carriers. Available since mid-2004, the latest suite release includes the ability to more accurately identify customer, product, channel, and tariff profitability. The application's functionality is based not only on SAS' vast implementation experience, but also on SAS' demonstrated activity-based management (ABM) technology, which is in a great part owing to the 2002 acquisition of the activity-based costing and management functionality of former ABC Technologies. These capabilities provide telecommunication companies with more granular views of cost and profitability throughout the organization, providing information that is essential to driving corporate revenue growth and profitability.
Telecommunications companies have historically allocated costs based on traditional accounting methods, which has often resulted in the inaccurate attribution of costs to products, customers, and channels. By using an activity based costing approach (ABC), carriers should be able to assign values to the actual drivers of these costs. ABC attempts to allocate overhead costs on a more realistic basis rather than focusing exclusively on direct labor or machine hours. It is a cost accounting system that accumulates costs based on activities performed. It then uses cost drivers to allocate the costs to products or other bases, such as customers, markets, or projects. SAS' implementation experience with carriers shows that 80 to 90 percent of profitability comes from 20 to 40 percent of customers. Building on this, the ABC strategy will provide CSPs with valuable information on customers, indicating who has the potential to turn into a revenue maker, who should be kept or let go. The solutions should also identify "who" and "what", and "when" they will be eligible for cross- and up-selling opportunities, of which this is a significant move towards near real-time data capture analysis and reaction.
There is a renewed imperative for CSPs to maximize customer profitability and build win-win relationships that inspire customer loyalty and confound competitors. Amdocs' customers face the common challenge of building stronger, more profitable relationships with their customers, which requires the ability to identify, keep, and grow relationships with their most valuable (meaning, profitable) customers.
Thus, the SAS alliance might be crucial for upgrading and leveraging Amdocs' capabilities through the use of valuable business information accumulated within its still diverse systems. This vital information has rarely been extracted before, although many Amdocs' systems are the only business lifeblood for straddled and struggling customer service operators. Namely, a great deal of business information flows through Amdocs' billing, CRM, orders management, mediation, and other systems, but, without the connection between these disparate data, they cannot be accessed, and are therefore unusable. Cooperation between Amdocs and SAS should make it possible to collect this business information from all these systems, cross-reference it, analyze the cross-referencing, and deliver the resulting conclusions to the relevant decision makers within a fairly short time span.
This valuable information should then be almost immediately converted into monetary rewards for the customer service operator and the company. For instance, among many things, analyzing this information should enable operators to know which services are more profitable versus those which are less profitable; what is the mood among users with regard to demand for new services; whether and how existing services should be changed; which users are on the brink of abandoning their operator, and how they can be kept; and what additional services should be offered to each user.
Further, data collected from the orders management system, should, for example, tell the operator, in almost real time, how many orders are still in the system, how many orders arrive every day, which products were ordered, the speed of the response to the order, when payment will arrive, etc. Collaboration between Amdocs and SAS, if truly committed to by both, should make it possible to collect and analyze information stored in these Amdocs' systems, and deliver the conclusions and recommendations to the operator's decision-makers in the form of graphs and practical reports.
Part three of the Amdocs Overhauls Its Marketing series.
In addition to its new partnership with IBM, (See Part Two) in mid-February, Amdocs and SAS Institute, the world's leader in business intelligence (BI) software, announced that they have formed a global strategic alliance to deliver advanced marketing automation (MA) and decision-centric BI solutions to CSPs. Together, the two companies pledge to enable CSPs to better track and analyze valuable customer data and dynamically present the resulting intelligence via operational systems, such as billing, call center, and ordering.
User companies should thus benefit from advanced customer and market segmentation (a marketing strategy in which the total market is disaggregated into submarkets, or segments, sharing some measurable characteristic based on demographics, psychographics, lifestyle, geography, benefits, etc.), rapid deployment of one-to-one marketing campaigns (a marketing strategy for sending a particular message to a single customer, often assisted by a marketing database) and improved product lifecycle management (PLM) will possibly reduce operating costs, enhance customer loyalty and lifetime value, and increase profitability.
Through a suite of joint solutions, Amdocs' telecommunications industry expertise and established operational applications, coupled with SAS' predictive analytics and profitability software, customers should benefit from a combination of strong analytical software, business consulting, and implementation services, allowing them to unlock valuable intelligence from underlying operational systems.
Available immediately, the first offering from Amdocs and SAS is the Customer Profitability and Segmentation solution, which should allow CSPs to understand the costs associated with doing business with their customers. It will enable them to gain vital insight into their customers' behavioral drivers, and to use that knowledge to make business decisions. Ultimately, this solutions aims to maximize customer profitability and create a highly personalized and differentiated customer experience. Other solutions, such as churn management and predictive modeling, will be rolled out in a foreseeable future.
The product marketing and development deal lets SAS take over the support of Amdocs' current marketing campaign management application, which is largely based on the technology acquired by Amdocs from its acquisition of Xchange. Consequently, Amdocs will encourage its few dozen campaign management customers to migrate to SAS' Marketing Automation 4 offering. Existing Amdocs customers of other modules that were built based on Xchange, including Amdocs Opportunity Advisor, will not benefit much from this partnership, although they will continue to be supported.
Bundled with that, these customers will also be offered access to the SAS Telecommunications Intelligence Solutions, the company's set of prepackaged applications tailored to meet the distinctive needs of carriers. Available since mid-2004, the latest suite release includes the ability to more accurately identify customer, product, channel, and tariff profitability. The application's functionality is based not only on SAS' vast implementation experience, but also on SAS' demonstrated activity-based management (ABM) technology, which is in a great part owing to the 2002 acquisition of the activity-based costing and management functionality of former ABC Technologies. These capabilities provide telecommunication companies with more granular views of cost and profitability throughout the organization, providing information that is essential to driving corporate revenue growth and profitability.
Telecommunications companies have historically allocated costs based on traditional accounting methods, which has often resulted in the inaccurate attribution of costs to products, customers, and channels. By using an activity based costing approach (ABC), carriers should be able to assign values to the actual drivers of these costs. ABC attempts to allocate overhead costs on a more realistic basis rather than focusing exclusively on direct labor or machine hours. It is a cost accounting system that accumulates costs based on activities performed. It then uses cost drivers to allocate the costs to products or other bases, such as customers, markets, or projects. SAS' implementation experience with carriers shows that 80 to 90 percent of profitability comes from 20 to 40 percent of customers. Building on this, the ABC strategy will provide CSPs with valuable information on customers, indicating who has the potential to turn into a revenue maker, who should be kept or let go. The solutions should also identify "who" and "what", and "when" they will be eligible for cross- and up-selling opportunities, of which this is a significant move towards near real-time data capture analysis and reaction.
There is a renewed imperative for CSPs to maximize customer profitability and build win-win relationships that inspire customer loyalty and confound competitors. Amdocs' customers face the common challenge of building stronger, more profitable relationships with their customers, which requires the ability to identify, keep, and grow relationships with their most valuable (meaning, profitable) customers.
Thus, the SAS alliance might be crucial for upgrading and leveraging Amdocs' capabilities through the use of valuable business information accumulated within its still diverse systems. This vital information has rarely been extracted before, although many Amdocs' systems are the only business lifeblood for straddled and struggling customer service operators. Namely, a great deal of business information flows through Amdocs' billing, CRM, orders management, mediation, and other systems, but, without the connection between these disparate data, they cannot be accessed, and are therefore unusable. Cooperation between Amdocs and SAS should make it possible to collect this business information from all these systems, cross-reference it, analyze the cross-referencing, and deliver the resulting conclusions to the relevant decision makers within a fairly short time span.
This valuable information should then be almost immediately converted into monetary rewards for the customer service operator and the company. For instance, among many things, analyzing this information should enable operators to know which services are more profitable versus those which are less profitable; what is the mood among users with regard to demand for new services; whether and how existing services should be changed; which users are on the brink of abandoning their operator, and how they can be kept; and what additional services should be offered to each user.
Further, data collected from the orders management system, should, for example, tell the operator, in almost real time, how many orders are still in the system, how many orders arrive every day, which products were ordered, the speed of the response to the order, when payment will arrive, etc. Collaboration between Amdocs and SAS, if truly committed to by both, should make it possible to collect and analyze information stored in these Amdocs' systems, and deliver the conclusions and recommendations to the operator's decision-makers in the form of graphs and practical reports.
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