South African cellular company MTN is preparing itself for increased competition in the cellular market by focusing more on their customers. While most telecoms companies have yet to address their customer relationship strategies, MTN has already put in place a sophisticated customer relationship management system which works off SAS Institute software, Enterprise Miner. MTN has chosen to implement its CRM project internally, rather than choose an outsource company because of the specialist nature of the project, and because of the need for a rapid response to any changes in market conditions.
Garth Brown, Manager of Management Information Systems (MIS) at MTN, says that if implemented properly there can be massive returns on investment from customer relationship management. "By implementing the solution in a series of iterative stages, each one delivering business benefits there can be an early return on investment," he says.
But he cautions that CRM is more than just the technology. "At MTN we believe that the way that we go about CRM is as important as the tools we use - it is in essence a mindset," he points out. "You need to use the correct tools and the right business partners for the consulting side," he adds. MTN believes that CRM is a business practice, not a software product, and it follows that this needs to be practised throughout the company. "Within MTN we have changed our approach to be able to become a fully customer-centric organisation," he says.
Based on SAS Institute's data mining product Enterprise Miner the system allows MTN to create campaigns and to manage these easily with the data warehouse that has been created. "We have followed a step-by-step methodology based on recommendations from SAS Institute," says Brown. The reason for choosing SAS Institute lay in the fact that the company has created structured tools and methodologies used in the process of establishing a data warehouse. "Their software is able to utilise three different kinds of statistical analysis which means that we will reach the right answer and we won't be locked into something that isn't flexible enough for our future needs."
Brown says that part of the success of their project lies in the fact that they planned and designed their customer relationship project thoroughly before they embarked on the technical side. "We obtained the necessary consensus from the marketing department first, and then we proceeded to do the design and architecture. We started with small campaigns but have set our sights fairly high," he says. MTN commissioned McKinsey Company to carry out the groundwork to produce a thorough design that would work in the context of MTN.
Because MTN operates in a highly competitive environment they needed to move fast and implemented their first data warehouse within 12 weeks using SAS Institute's rapid methodology. "We started off small but thought big," says Brown who added that it is imperative to choose the methodologies that suit the business. "We had everything carefully designed and planned beforehand."
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