CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT - Demanding marketing
A new breed of service providers are helping to reverse the fortunes of some of Europe's most influential mobile companies - by helping them manage their customer lifecycles far more effectively, explains Georgia Hannias
Traditional marketing is no longer a viable communications tool in the mobile telecoms world. Glossy adverts in the papers, mass-marketing direct mail and telemarketing are not winning customers' loyalty - especially when every operator seems to be offering the same thing. In this confusing climate of choice, even a great product or service isn't making the real difference to business growth. What customers are looking for is an operator who can understand their preferences and ultimately tailor their services to give them what they want, when they want it.
Understanding the needs of the customer is what Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) is all about. This communication trend focuses on managing customer behaviour by finding a way to create a bond between the operator and the customer throughout the customer's lifecycle. Once a one-to-one communication is created, consumer behaviour can be monitored, so that companies know exactly what their customers want and can subsequently provide a tailored service to meet individual needs. This is usually the first step forward in successfully delivering targeted services and, most importantly, building a strong, long term relationship between the service provider and the customer.
"Customer lifecycle management has a future in mobile telephony - especially in Western Europe where there is a blurring of fixed and mobile services," explains Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst at Quocirca. "This convergence is eating away at revenue generated by traditional services such as voice calls. To find new ways of earning income and to keep customers happy, operators have to differentiate themselves from their competitors- and to do so in a way that makes a subscriber feel valued and not just a number. CLM can help achieve this by enabling an operator to target an individual person."
Marketing departments are all too aware of this demand for more personalised services and how customer lifecycle management can help achieve this goal. More importantly, they can usually produce the creative ideas that are needed to develop the campaigns that will engage customers. The main problem, however, is that the internal complexities involved in executing new programmes usually prevent them from becoming a reality. IT departments tend to place more emphasis on the OSS and BSS systems and the call centre side of a business, which means that marketing's requirements almost always takes a back seat internally.
Consequently, campaigns that should only take weeks to complete and launch can take months, and many compromises are usually made to get a programme out the door- leaving marketing departments frustrated by the fact that they haven't quite delivered the programme they wanted.
Fortunately, there is a new way of simplifying the execution and enhancing the flexibility of personalised marketing campaigns known as Marketing on Demand. Simply put, Marketing on Demand is a software-as-a-service model that removes the internal complexities involved in launching new campaigns. It enables marketing departments to be more focused on the programmes they want to deliver, leaving the technical execution to a team of external specialists.
With the availability of marketing on demand solutions, marketing departments can choose to implement customer retention programmes quickly and easily without the need for a long-drawn out IT project. This brings a whole new dimension to the way marketing departments can control and execute their marketing campaigns. It provides the flexibility to capitalise on existing customer data, regardless of where it is stored within the organisation, as it is fed to a hosted solution which is capable of automating all out and inbound interactions in real-time. This enables operators to manage customers on a one-to-one basis so that a relevant and consistent communication journey begins and continues throughout the customer's lifecycle. Best of all, marketing on demand means that any number of programmes can be launched in one go, thereby allowing operators to execute and manage a combination of programmes without any delay or restrictions.
Software as a service (SaaS) based-delivery model is already driving major growth in the customer relationship management applications market. According to analyst Gartner, mobile operators and other enterprises continued to invest in front-office applications last year, with worldwide CRM software revenue exceeding $7.4 billion (£3.7 billion) in 2007, up 14 per cent from $6.5 billion (£3.2 billion) in 2006.
By year-end 2007, SaaS represented more than $1 billion in CRM software revenue. "The sustained performance of major on-demand solutions providers is driving the growth in the SaaS segment," says Sharon Mertz, Gartner research director. Mertz also explained this method of delivery was likely to become the dominant one in this market by 2011, as companies updated existing business automation systems to ensure they could meet expected targets for business and revenue growth.
"Marketing on demand deployment models are helping communications providers use their CRM systems as a strategic tool to gain competitive advantage, maximise loyalty, reduce churn and increase ARPU throughout the customer lifecycle," says Mikko Hietanen, CEO of Agillic. "Customer Lifecycle Management solutions take the CRM SaaS model one step further, by providing communications service providers with an application that enables real-time, multi-channel, cross channel dialogues driven by the customer. What this helps to achieve is the delivery of a true and consistent understanding of how an individual interacts with their service provider."
Software systems like those offered by Agillic also help communications service providers and their marketing agencies to work even more efficiently as it is programmed to automatically execute the business rules required to reach customers across all touch points from printed direct mail, digital media and customer services.
"Agillic is one of the first companies I have heard of that focuses exclusively on customer lifecycle management," says Joel Cooper, Senior Analyst, Europe at Pyramid Research. "In highly saturated telecoms markets, what Agillic offers is the kind of thing that operators would be advised to adopt. As customer growth dries up, customer lifecycle management is a good starting point in terms of better understanding exactly what the customer wants."
Agillic has many years of experience of deploying marketing on demand business models for its customers. The general principle is that marketing on demand must keep the co-ordination and collaboration of any project focused on the business value rather than the technology. Achieving this requires the assurance that promotional campaigns are set up correctly with the right messages - which is usually the biggest and most costly challenge for most mobile operators today.
Communication service providers can choose to implement a choice of best practice marketing concepts that are already successfully deployed and generating positive results. Consequently, marketing does not have to reinvent the wheel but instead can benefit from a quick route to market by simply adapting proven programmes with their own branding and business rules. As programmes develop, the marketing department can easily monitor the positive and negative effects of the programmes and make immediate alterations in real time so no time is lost to time-consuming code changes. They also benefit from having access to advisers that can guide marketing on the best programmes that will match their most pressing business objectives.
Most operators already possess existing data about customer preferences and usage patterns which can be uploaded to the CLM solutions to execute meaningful, customised and timely marketing programmes by crossing all customer touch points," says Mikko Hietanen. "More importantly, these communications are only received through channels that are agreed to by the customer, which keeps them happy and strengthens relationships even more. This is something that CRM could never provide as the human dimension does not exist."
Georgia Hannias
Share this article with others
Post to del.icio.us
Printed from http://www.eurocomms.com/features/112060/CUSTOMER_LIFECYCLE_MANAGEMENT_-_Demanding_marketing.html
Comment on this article
Skip to comments
We encourage users to analyse, comment on and even challenge European Communications's articles, including the one above - 'CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT - Demanding marketing'
User reviews and comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site.
Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. We will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site.