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Vodafone Spain customer loyalty programs get a boost from ILOG JRules
New JRules-based system will enable online promotions for the first time
ILOG, a leading supplier of enterprise-class software components and services, has announced that Vodafone Spain has selected ILOG JRules, a key offering in ILOG's Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, to create a new centralized promotions platform for its 10 million customers in Spain.
Using ILOG JRules, Vodafone Spain expects to enhance its customer acquisition and customer loyalty programs and boost sales during traditionally slow periods by rapidly introducing new promotions.
In addition to allowing Vodafone to offer online promotions for the first time, a new rules-based promotions system called NPPI (New Platform of Integrated Promotions) will reduce the time-to-market of new promotions and will facilitate the creation of new and innovative promotions.
In the extremely competitive mobile phone market, a service provider's primary concern is "churn management," i.e. reducing the number of customers that move to other carriers. In Spain, Vodafone relies heavily on promotions to support both new customer growth and customer loyalty management programs to reduce churn. These programs rely on incentives for new subscribers as well as rewards for current customers.
Prior to deploying the new rule-based NPPI, the management of promotions at Vodafone Spain was a cumbersome and time-consuming task since promotions were hard-coded into different customer relationship management (CRM) and billing systems. New promotions and changes to existing promotions required code development to create or modify eligibility rules. Additional coding was then required to ensure the changes were consistent across the different systems. Vodafone Spain's marketing staff had to rely on IT developers to implement new promotions and changes, which resulted in long deployment cycles.
ILOG JRules will allow business policies that map to different promotions to be centralized and managed in a single platform. The advanced business rule management features, including the JRules repository, will give Vodafone Spain's marketing teams the tools to create or update promotions themselves, and group the related business policies into easy-to-understand decision tables, as well as monitor the response to promotions in real-time and make any necessary adjustments.
Following a short testing and debugging phase, new promotions can go into production within days instead of weeks, allowing Vodafone to be more competitive with its promotions. In addition, because ILOG JRules can process, in real time, the numerous events triggering promotions, Vodafone Spain can, for the first time, offer online promotions and notify its customers instantly of available rewards. In addition, ILOG JRules can enable the delivery of new types of promotions, such as contests, home-delivered gifts, or special "keys" for access to restricted sites.
"Improving our customer loyalty and customer acquisition programs were critical business objectives at Vodafone Spain," said Jose Ignacio Nogues, IT Manager, Product, Pricing and Billing, Vodafone Spain. "ILOG JRules brings unprecedented flexibility to our promotions management by giving our marketing experts greater control over their promotions for a faster business response time to competitive pressures, while improving our operational efficiency through faster time-to-market and consistency in policies and promotions across multiple systems and channels."
In Germany, Vodafone D2 is successfully using ILOG's BRMS as part of its Realtime Rating Solution for billing applications.
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