SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, is expected to launch a customer relationship management tool for the telecommunications industry at the National Center for Database Marketing’s 24th National Conference and Exhibition in Orlando this week.
The Churn Management Solution, which currently is used by customers in Germany but now will be available globally, is designed to help telecommunications companies reduce customer defection. It allows them to predict in advance which customers are likely to leave so they can take action to retain them.
CMS manages the entire churn process, including gathering and storing customer data, churn modeling to predict customers most likely to churn and distributing information via corporate intranets and portals.
CMS includes SAS’ data warehousing software and consulting services, which gather data relating to churn from an organization’s networking and billing systems and organize it for analysis. It also includes Enterprise Miner software for data mining, which finds a company’s profitable customers and the products and services they want to buy. Enterprise Miner also includes a template adapted specifically for the telecommunications industry.
“Churn is estimated to cost telecommunications companies around $4 billion each year, and with annual churn rates of around 25 to 30 percent , it typically takes three years for a telecommunications company to pay back the cost of replacing each lost customer with a new one,” said Phil Winters, vice president of marketing at SAS.
