Client name: A major mobile phone business

An internal review by our client identified variations in forecast and actual levels of customer churn. As a result, the client engaged us to review the underlying processes, systems and data which are used for analysing the customer base. The overall objective was to ensure accurate management information on key business parameters such as churn rates and revenue per customer.

Our starting point was an end-to-end review of the processes and systems involved in customer management. We also reviewed the client's business rules for defining active customers. These rules are complex for mobile operators, particularly for pre-pay customers, whose usage patterns may be highly sporadic.

The review rapidly identified a number of inconsistencies in the way that customers were defined as being active in systems used for CRM (Customer Relationship Management), billing and BI (Business Intelligence). These inconsistencies were the root cause of the client's data quality problems. Our work also quantified the magnitude of errors in the customer reporting data.

Following the review, we undertook a programme of remedial work to update the processing logic in all systems involved in the customer management process. We defined rigorous business rules for describing active customers and systematically implemented these in the relevant systems. We also recommended improved systems maintenance processes to ensure consistency of the new business rules would be maintained through ongoing future system upgrades.

The next phase of the work involved cleansing existing data to provide accurate measurement of customer statistics as the new baseline. We achieved this using analytics tools from business intelligence software specialists, The SAS Institute.

Finally, we implemented a new MIS platform for the client to provide weekly analyses of customer base and churn statistics.

As a result of the work, the client is able to report accurately on movements in the customer base and to predict more accurate future churn rates . The new MIS is delivering a better understanding of customer base composition and customer usage patterns which in turn are improving our clients financial analysis capabilities.