HIGHLIGHTS
4X
processing capacity for data quality, data export, etc.
PCI Compliance
finally achieved
Significant Reduction
in time to consolidate disparate data
Overview
Every month, every wireless customer receives a bill: a golden opportunity to promote new offerings, dialogue with customers, and deepen loyalty. One service provider sought to take greater advantage of this opportunity by moving more aggressively into personalized transpromo marketing. To do so, it partnered with a leading global business process outsourcer. However, the outsourcer’s legacy COBOL-based data processing systems made it difficult to integrate data for creating accurate statements, inserting relevant messages, and integrating with variable printing systems. This created unacceptable delays, and risked account security.
To solve these problems, Redpoint Global worked with the service provider and outsourcer to rapidly deploy the Redpoint CDP. Within six weeks, the data problems were under control: both partners now have a fully integrated, automated, and robust data management and marketing execution environment.
Using Redpoint, the service provider and its outsourcer work together to deliver account statements, advanced transpromo campaigns, and other communication programs. Redpoint streamlined the process, eliminated SLA violations, simplified transpromo marketing rule creation, and cut costs.
Building on Redpoint, the outsourcer has also achieved PCI compliance, gaining new confidence that it can protect customer data for billing. It has since replicated its new Redpoint-based processes with several leading telecoms.
Background
Redpoint’s deployment supported a partnership between one of Europe’s largest telecommunications service providers and one of its leading global business process outsourcers.
The Challenges
Transpromo marketing – the integration of relevant, personalized marketing messages on customer bills and statements – requires tight integration among billing, CRM, data mining/analysis, and other enterprise data systems. However, Redpoint’s outsourcer was hobbled by a legacy billing system built many years ago in COBOL.
That system had become increasingly brittle and inflexible: virtually impossible to maintain or update. Much of its legacy code was now undecipherable, creating huge business risks to mission-critical processes – especially because many of the outsourcer’s COBOL programmers have retired, and few younger programmers know COBOL.
To work around the system’s profound limitations, the outsourcer had implemented manual interventions and custom scripts that were virtually impossible to manage.
Saddled with this system, the outsourcer struggled to integrate data for transpromo marketing on a timely basis. It could not reliably integrate with modern third-party transpromo printing systems. It could not consistently meet its promised SLAs, placing its client relationships at risk. Perhaps worst of all, because its processes and applications were so poorly defined and documented, it could not achieve critical PCI certification for safeguarding its clients’ account security.
In just six weeks, Redpoint helped a leading telecom and its outsourcer fix major data problems— freeing itself to build powerful transpromo marketing campaigns, cut marketing costs, strengthen business alignment, deepen customer loyalty, and reduce churn.
The Solution
Working together with Redpoint, the outsourcer and telecom service provider implemented the Redpoint CDP platform. Within six weeks, they finally had a common and consistent approach to data management. Then, working with Redpoint, both companies quickly integrated billing with other internal and external systems for successful transpromo marketing.
The service provider and its outsourcer now utilize Redpoint for all data integration and data quality tasks; for creating flexible transpromo personalization rules; and for linking billing data with external variable data printing (VDP) systems and their print production vendor.
The Results
Redpoint has not only enabled the telecom service provider to fully leverage transpromo marketing: it has also delivered across-the-board cost, performance, and security benefits to both the telecom and its outsourcer.
Together, the companies have quadrupled their processing capacity for data quality, data export, and other tasks. They have significantly reduced the time required to pull together disparate data to serve a variety of purposes, such as transpromo. For two full years, the outsourcer has completely eliminated SLA violations associated with billing.
The outsourcer has made all these improvements while reducing operational headcount by 60 percent. And it has finally achieved crucial PCI compliance, strengthening confidence that it can protect customer account security. These improvements have not only strengthened the outsourcer’s relationship with this service provider; they have helped the outsourcer leverage additional opportunities elsewhere.
In the future the partners will leverage Redpoint more broadly for sophisticated cross-channel marketing. With Redpoint, the telecom company will be able to address an entirely new set of marketing challenges – especially those related to increasing loyalty and reducing churn.