Customer Challenge
This telecommunications service provider sought to enhance its collections process to address late payments and proactively foster stronger customer relationships. The company aimed to leverage its extensive customer data and adopt a more personalized and efficient approach to communication and outreach.
Specifically, the company aimed to:
- Proactively identify customers at risk of late payments: Use data-driven insights to predict potential payment issues and intervene early.
- Personalize communication strategies: Customize communication for each customer based on their payment habits and preferences, ensuring relevant and effective outreach.
- Automate multi-channel communication: Streamline and automate outreach across various channels (e.g., SMS, email, call center) to improve efficiency and reach customers effectively.
- Enhance customer experience: Maintain positive customer relationships throughout the collections process by providing clear, transparent, and timely communication.
By achieving these goals, our customer aimed to improve collection performance, reduce churn, and ultimately boost customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Partner Solution
Strata, an AWS Advanced Partner, developed a customized campaign solution to tackle these challenges. The solution combines AWS services and SAS Customer Intelligence tools:
- Machine Learning (ML): It uses ML models on AWS to analyze customer data and produce churn propensity scores, helping identify customers likely to miss payments.
- Personalized Communication: Based on these scores, the solution segments customers and customizes communication strategies, using SMS, email, and call center outreach.
- Automation: AWS services like SQS, SES, Lambda, Glue Jobs, API Gateway, and S3 are used to support these channels and work together with SAS to automate communication workflows, ensuring timely and relevant outreach with less manual effort.
- Monitoring: Amazon QuickSight dashboards offer insights into campaign performance, supporting data-driven optimization and continuous improvements.
- Data Integration and Storage: Amazon S3 and Oracle RDS store and manage data needed for campaign execution and reporting, ensuring data consistency and accuracy.
Strata’s solution not only solves technical issues but also provides ongoing support and maintenance to keep the system effective and adaptable to the changing needs of the telecommunications provider.
Results and Benefits
The implemented solution has provided significant benefits for the telecommunications provider:
- Improved Collections Performance: By proactively identifying and engaging at-risk customers, the company has reduced bad debt by 13% in the first five months, which has also decreased involuntary churn among subscription-based customers.
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Personalized and timely communication has resulted in a more positive customer experience, fostering stronger relationships and reducing churn.
- Increased Operational Efficiency: Automation has streamlined the collections process, cutting down manual effort and enabling the team to focus on more strategic tasks. Specifically, targeted communication efforts have allowed a more focused approach for high-value customers, leading to nearly a 20% reduction in collections contact center operational costs.
- Data-Driven Insights: Reporting and analytics empower the company to make data-driven decisions, continuously improving its campaign strategies for optimal results.
Why Strata?
Strata was selected as the implementation partner because of their:
Deep AWS Expertise: Strata’s broad experience with AWS services and their status as an AWS Advanced Partner ensured a smooth and effective implementation process.
Telecommunications Industry Knowledge: Strata’s thorough understanding of the telecommunications sector, along with their expertise in SAS Campaign Management, enabled them to customize the solution to meet the specific needs and challenges of the provider.
Proven Success with the Client: Strata’s prior collaboration with the customer on successful marketing automation projects helped build trust and a strong working relationship.
Real-Time Campaign Expertise: Strata’s experience with real-time campaign automation and machine learning was essential for deploying the solution’s advanced targeting and personalization features.
Ongoing Support and Maintenance: Strata’s dedication to continuous support and maintenance ensured the solution would keep delivering value and adapt to the telecommunications provider’s changing needs.
By integrating AWS’s powerful cloud infrastructure with Strata’s expertise in telecommunications and campaign automation, the customer implemented a highly effective, scalable, and secure solution that greatly enhanced their collections process and customer engagement.
