Facts in your Face

Do the volume and duration of long-distance calls made in the non-peak hours
translate into net gains for a telecom service provider? Else, why did a chunk
of users switch to the competition in a specific month? Such queries are no
longer tackled by educated guesses, but business intelligence solutions come
into play. Arjun Erry tells us why...

l In an age
ruled by RoI, why would enterprises go in for business intelligence solutions,
which have essentially been in the "nice-to-have" category?

Take the case of a telecom company, which typically loses customers even as
it adds new ones. Let’s assume the cost of adding is approximately Rs 1,500
per customer. When the primary aim is to reduce loss and improve acquisition, it
is critical to have accurate information about why a customer walks out.
Occurrences like increased number of complaint calls or delayed payment cycles
just before a customer discontinues the service, need to be recorded and
analyzed in order to curb the churn. Instead of increasing the cost of acquiring
a new customer by making unlimited cold calls or resorting to unsolicited mail,
it makes sense to identify which sub-set of people has largest number of
potential users and attack that segment. If you have good customer intelligence,
you will also know the customer’s preferred mode of response and attract
customers. These are classic examples of business intelligence being used to
increase RoI.

l About 14% of
SAS’ business globally comes from the government. What is the opportunity of
tapping this segment in India?

Government departments in India understand that they need to use business
intelligence. How soon they start using it would depend on the IT readiness of
each department. Business intelligence could be very useful in the defense
segment. Currently, there are several government agencies that have defense
related data. Collating and analyzing information from these diverse sources
would yield some critical findings. We have been interacting with certain
defense organizations and hope to work with them.

l Most of your
customers are large enterprises. Which are the segments you are targeting?

Orange, Novartis, HDFC, Reserve Bank of India, Bharti Cellular and Hindustan
Lever are among our key clients. But, we haven’t excluded anyone. All
enterprises can use business intelligence solutions, but provided they have the
IT-readiness, not just in terms of processes and systems, but a management with
a zeal to understand and adopt what we have.

Manjiri Kalghatgi