| Q3 2012 | ATS Network & Billing Update |
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ATS Finds Money in Your Network: SimCall™: Revenue & Service Assurance at the Switch™ ROI Estimator Dashboard & Metrics - Turn Data Into Actionable Information MTP™: Automation at the Switch™ AMADEUS™: CDR Mining and Analysis for Recip Comp/CABS
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The ATS Network & Billing Update is published by Advanced Technologies & Services, Inc. (www.atso.com), a revenue and service assurance solutions provider. This free newsletter is a guide to telecommunications OSS, billing, and revenue assurance news and other telecom industry analysis. To unsubscribe, contribute an article, or for offbeat news, please scroll to the end. Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends and co-workers! In this issue:
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Predicting Customer Churn via Social Network Analytics
Tweet
By: Ryan Guthrie, Director of Network Integrity, ATS |
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If you work for a Wireline, Wireless, or VoIP carrier, I can almost guarantee that someone in your company is losing sleep over customer churn. Why are they leaving? Where are they going? Could we have saved them? How much is it going to cost us to replace them? In today's extremely competitive business environment, many telecommunications carriers are measuring their success by the size and growth of their profit margins. As a result, carriers are under intense pressure to reduce or eliminate the major threats to these margins that arise from revenue leakage, inaccurate inter-carrier billing, fraud, and churn. As mobile penetration has increased over the years, the focus of marketing at many carriers has shifted from customer acquisition to customer retention. Studies have found that it is much more cost efficient to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Therefore, in order to maintain profitability, carriers must identify ways to control customer churn. Social Network Analytics have emerged as a key paradigm in modern sociology, technology, and information sciences. The paradigm stems from the view that the attributes of an individual in a network are less important than their ties with other individuals in the network. Through the exploration of this theory, ATS has examined the communication patterns of millions of customers with an eye towards the impact a customer who has churned can have on their social network. Extensive research and studies have confirmed that a customer who has churned can have a tremendous impact on the probability that another customer within their social network will churn. In an effort to combat this issue and reduce customer churn, ATS has developed software to calculate the propensity for a given customer to churn based primarily on the analysis of their social network. The module uses a proprietary algorithm to assign a score to each customer that represents the propensity for that customer to churn within the next 30-60 days. The ability to identify customers that are at an increased risk of churn provides tremendous benefits to the marketing department. Directly targeting customers likely to churn helps marketers spend 'smarter' and ultimately reduce the overall company churn rate. For example, let's say a carrier spends $1M dollars on a TV campaign that targets 250k customers ($4 per customer). The average churn rate among those customers will likely mimic the carrier's overall average churn rate. However, if the carrier targets the 50k customers that are at a higher risk of churn, they could spend up to $20 per customer and have a better chance at saving the customer as well as having an immediate positive impact on the overall company churn percentage. So help
yourself or the executives at your company get better sleep at night
and be proactive in indentifying potential churning customers.
It's almost never too late to save a customer and it's always
cheaper to keep a customer than to find a new one. |
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ATS Inks Deal to Implement SimCall Wireless at Tier 1 North American Wireless Carrier Tweet |
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Wayne, NJ, July 7, 2012 - Advanced Technologies & Services, Inc. (ATS), a leading provider of operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) for communications providers, announced it has entered into an agreement with a Tier 1 North American Wireless Carrier to implement SimCall Wireless to ensure network and billing integrity across the carrier's footprint. With this latest implementation, the carrier now employs SimCall on both its wireline and GSM/CDMA wireless networks. ATS' SimCall for wireline has been utilized by carriers across North America for nearly 20 years. The technology simulates calls across the network to identify routing and rating errors causing revenue leakage and service disruption. More than 70% of all wireline switches in the US have been tested with the tool. Earlier this year, ATS released its latest version in its SimCall product line: SimCall Wireless. SimCall Wireless includes many of the fundamental concepts that made SimCall successful for so many years in the wireline world. The new product simulates calls through the switch and mediation platforms to identify errors that lead to under-billing, over-billing, blocked calls, etc. The most recent implementation of the tool has already identified thousands of network and billing errors as well as assisted in root cause analyses. "Over the past 15 years ATS' network integrity tools have become the gold standard for wireline network assurance," says Randall Guthrie, ATS' President. "The introduction of SimCall Wireless to one of the largest carriers in North America offers ATS the opportunity to not only help a major carrier to evolve their network, but also to continue our tradition of delivering scalable, creative, and innovative solutions to our exciting and rapidly changing industry." Extensive
research and surveys have shown that network issues and inaccurate
billing continue to be among the top concerns of customers and is a
leading contributor to churn. By ensuring that the network is
operating optimally, the carrier will increase revenue, reduce calls
into customer service and repair, and ultimately reduce customer
churn. |
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ATS is on Twitter |
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ATS is now on Twitter with all the latest happenings at ATS and around the telecom industry. |
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Losing Disney - Every Year: Telecom Fraud Tops $40 Billion a Year Courtesy of Light Reading Tweet |
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Telecom fraud is an ever-present drain
on operator profitability, and for decades service providers have
built and implemented software systems and business procedures to
limit theft. In spite of those efforts, the global annual losses are
now estimated to be US$40 billion -- which is about the annual
revenue of Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS)
That $40 billion represents 2 percent of the $2 trillion spent each year on telecom services. In comparison, U.S. retailers lose about 1.5 percent of their business annually to theft -- which means it's easier to steal phone service than to shoplift from Wal-Mart. The outlook for reducing loss from telecom service theft is not promising. Cost-cutting is likely to increase vulnerability to some forms of theft. The rapid growth of mobile services, including mobile payment offerings, will no doubt spark new attempts at larceny.
Click Here for the full story. |
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OffBeat News: Nomophobia - Do You Have It? Courtesy of tmForum Tweet |
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Do you have a morbid fear of leaving your mobile phone behind when you go out? Have you experienced a churning sensation in your stomach when you realize you may have lost your phone? Does losing network reception cause negative physical symptoms, or running out of battery cause a panic attack? Do you take your phone to bed with you, and do you 'always' leave your phone on? If you recognize these symptoms, then you are likely to be suffering from nomophobia - the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. Don't feel too bad; it seems that 66 percent of the population shares your disorder, and it's a number that is rising steadily.
Click Here for the full story. |
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