Subscriber Data Integrity in the Telecommunications Industry

Scorecard Systems is a leader in reporting and analysis solutions for telecommunications companies in North America. This partnership allows us to bring the successful Scorecard Systems to the UK and EMEA region.

Subscriber Data Integrity: Telecoms BI starts here

• Do you understand why subscriber, production and unit analysis is the core to customer management in your BI Solution?
• Do you know what the traditional subscriber tracking metrics are and how should they be expected?
• Do you know what the pitfalls with traditional subscriber tracking methodologies are?
• What is the successful approach many telecom operators have used to drive higher subscriber data integrity?

Scorecard Systems' BI solution for the telecoms industry addresses these questions.

Subscriber Analysis: The Foundation

What do telecoms operators expect from BI solutions?

"To effectively transform telecoms data into strategic intelligence to radically improved decision making, enhance operational efficiencies and create competitive advantage".

But what does this mean?

For Call Data Record (CDR) analysts it means being able to effectively monitor calling patterns to optimise network and to predict churn based on dropped call records or decreases in outbound calls, for example. Data from Customer Service Records (CSRs) should be used to save unhappy customers and identify upsell opportunities. Almost most importantly, BI in telecoms needs to cater for Customer Profitability Analysis so that profitable customers can be maintained and the cost of customer acquisition in low margin channels can be reduced. Ultimately, the role of BI is to facilitate business decisions that wil increase traffic on your network!

Most carriers are not using their BI tools correctly...

This results in inaccurate capture of activations, churn, plan to plan migrations and transfers between landline/wireless phones. Decision making executives STILL don't have one version of the truth and the use of data warehouse (DW) / BI tools is usually limited to a core group of analysts, restricting wide deployment to sales, marketing and finance functions due to lack of 'trust' in the numbers. The use of ineffective spreadsheets proliferates; using different business rules and data sources - not wonder the BI tools aren't providing much 'intelligence'!

To best empower traffic analysis, customer profitability and revenue assurance you need to understand what churn and what a new acquisition really is: ask yourself the following questions:

• Was the new customer-focused revenue generating service initiated at the same time the customer activated?
• Was it a first time upsell to the product?
• Did a reconnect of a product the customer had previously cancelled?
• Is the reconnect actually a downgrade from a bundle or a package?
• Or was the 'new acquisition' simply a current customer who is 'rate plan surfing'?

Traditional Subscriber Tracking Metrics

Subscriber Metrics: Traditional Fixed Line, Mobile, Multiple System Operator (MSO) and Direct To The Home (DTTH) Services

Common Metrics include voluntary or involuntary:

• Beginning Active Units and Ending Active Units.
• Connects, Disconnects and Reconnects.
• Upgrades, Downgrades and Sidegrades.
• Activations, Reactivations and Deactivations.
• Suspends.
• Migrations - if product A cancels and product B activates, then count migration from A to B.
• % Churn and % Market Penetration.

Traditional Subscriber Reporting Methodologies (and why they are bad!)

Method 1: Count Billed Customers

If we sent a bill, they must be a customer or the service must be active:

• If customer / product activated on the 31st of the month and was not billed: not counted. - WRONG
• If customer / product was billed on the 10th of the month and cancelled on the 12th: is counted. - WRONG
• Prepaid: no bills. - WRONG

Method 2: Snapshots

Extract snapshot table from Billing System / Data Warehouse and drive customer / product activity from dates:

• January 1st: Activation on product 1.
• January 3rd: Customer changes to product 2. Now appears as NEW activation on product 2. Should show this as MIGRATION from product 1 to 2.
• February 28th: Deactivation on product 2.
• March 1st: Reactivation on product 2. In the billing system deactivation date turns blank and counts NEW activation on March 1st and January and February data for that customer / product is lost.

The reporting system snapshots cannot be trusted!

Method 3: Service Orders + Manual Entry

Many carriers realised that trusting the billing system was not a good idea. They needed more accuracy and richness of data. Manually entered disconnect / connect reason codes and work order types were introduced as a remedy. The problem with this is that CSRs, dealers and sales people used these codes to their own advantage to try to earn extra commissions!

Subscriber Activity: What We Have Seen

• Most carriers: Sales reports 35,000 new activations. Marketing reports 34,900 activations. Finance reports 29,000 new activations, accuses sales and marketing of cheating for extra commissions.
• Some carriers: Keep top-line number the same but upon drill down to tariff, rate plan, sales person, geography, customer segment, tenure and the numbers DO NOT TIE UP!
• Other carriers: Use more accurate methods for business rules but many are inflexible due to hard-coding and the audit trail to the billing system is hard to follow.

Subscriber Activity: Getting it Right (as Telecom BI starts here)

Get rid of all business rules that are not stored relationally; You need to be able to drill back to the customer for more detail and provide an audit trail back to the source systems. You can use all the front-end BI tools available to you AS LONG AS you ensure that the business rules are stored and maintained in ONE location.

Trust nobody; Do not necessarily based all business decisions on information from CSRs, dealers and sales people - they'll mostly look after their own interests and the billing / service order system will not necessarily reflect the true situation. Analysts writing business rules almost certainly never understand the true business drivers.

Get rid of all hard-coded business rules; Do not hard-code definitions for activations, churn, deactivations etc and steer clear of hard-coded links between "like" products for upgrade / downgrade analysis.

Always provide an audit trail; How did we get from one subscriber state to another? Do we tie back the ending counts in the billing system or to the company's official business rules?

Subscriber Activity: Customer Success

Scorecard Systems' solution offers every telecoms carrier the deployment of a solution that will enable;

• Table-based business rule changes rather than requiring IT intervention.
• A superior approach to subscriber activity reporting eliminating "adding up service order" approaches.
• Deeper insight into subscriber activity.
• Ability to effectively answer questions like "how many access line disconnects were part of an upgrade to DSL?" or "how many customers too advantage of a promotion to activate a new product code but were simply sidegrades?".
• Provision of an audit trail for tracking back reported statistics to source data. The system should allow users to 'track back' the reported numbers through the business rules to the source billing system data.
• Enhancement of the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) ability to provide a single source for subscriber activity metrics, removing business rules and inconsistencies from dashboards, reports etc.

Download the Scorecard Systems Subscriber Data Integrity Presentation

Contact us to arrange a demo or to find out more about our partnership with Scorecard Systems.

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