In a quest for greater client base interaction, MTN is set to be the first local implementation of the SAS Solution for Enterprise Marketing Automation (EMA), the company's campaign management offering.
Says Jake Orpen, relationship marketing manager at MTN: "MTN is currently focusing on becoming more customer-centric, while at the same time gearing up for aggressive competition with the introduction of a third cellular operator.
"The business objective behind this implementation is to increase the size and complexity of our marketing campaigns -- segmenting customers by value and changing needs. Not only will this help MTN to target specific groups of customers, it will also assist us to reach critical customers faster," he explains.
"As customers' needs change over time, the EMA solution means that we can personalise our services to a greater degree, by anticipating actions around trigger events, such as birthdays, predictive model outputs and impending contract termination, basically enabling multiple interactions with one customer."
According to Jacques Hattingh, a consultant from ICON Corporation, assisting MTN from a selection and procurement perspective, the mobile telecom company had successfully managed its campaigns manually, but decided that this process was too time-consuming and analyst-intensive and had to be automated to become more effective. These resources could be deployed for more strategic analysis, rather than used for drawing contact lists and executing campaigns.
In June 2000, MTN invited pre-selected vendors to respond to a request for information (RFI), deciding to hold a very thorough screening process to find the right supplier, local or international. Eight vendors were initially contracted and, over a period of six months, whittled down gradually to SAS Institute SA and another company. The Meta Group ranked both short-listed vendors as market leaders in Campaign Management automation.
Says Hattingh: "The project was awarded to SAS Institute based on their fulfilment of a number of prerequisites for partner selection, including the consideration of MTN's existing systems and processes as well as cost factors. MTN's customer management department set a price limit on the project of R5 million -- taking hardware, software and manpower into account. SAS came in within budget and also accounted for exchange rate fluctuations by offering a fixed rate over a certain period."
Not only this, but the SAS model and proposal fitted snugly into the MTN environment and infrastructure. "Another major benefit was that because MTN was already running SAS technology, in the form of the Enterprise Miner data mining solution, future compliance need never become an issue. As a consequence, most MTN customer data already sits in a SAS environment," comments Hattingh.
Orpen maintains that there were a number of other factors surrounding their choice of SAS technology: "MTN was most impressed in our negotiations with SAS. They were extremely proactive and committed to transferring knowledge -- not just making a sale -- and were also flexible in their negotiations.
"SAS came into the tender with a future-conscious partnership approach and showed a great deal of commitment from the very first meetings, as well as an understanding of MTN requirements and infrastructure."
MTN expects to see a return on investment within 24 months as it aggressively roles out more customer-centric relationship campaigns. The project is currently in implementation stage and will take place over approximately 20 weeks.
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