U.S. Cellular boosts campaign volume and performance

U.S. Cellular is the 6th largest wireless carrier in the US. Based in Chicago, IL, the company and its 9,000 associates serve more than 6 million customers across the country. The company generated USD4.2 billion in revenue in 2010.

U.S. Cellular understands how important every call is to its customers and believes in providing a high-quality network, products, and services to make sure they stay connected. U.S. Cellular’s superior customer service goes beyond that to:

• Ensure that customer needs are always met, and
• Show customers what makes them more than just a phone company.

As demand for its wireless services has increased, U.S. Cellular has expanded its network—most recently, rolling out mobile broadband service to a number of metropolitan areas and introducing new products and services that make its customers more organized, efficient and productive.

The challenge
As a service company, U.S. Cellular had long recognized the need to build strong, lasting relationships with its customers—relationships that generate recurring revenue. As the company expanded and grew, it became difficult to be responsive to local customer needs and to track and measure the large number of varied messages that were being communicated to customers.

A key issue was that responsibility for campaign and contact activity was distributed too broadly across the company. It was not uncommon for both regional and corporate marketing organizations to target the same customers with messages that were not aligned.

“Everyone was pulling their own customer lists, based on some very general criteria,” said John Tompson, Senior Manager, Campaign Analytics, U.S. Cellular. “There was no record of who was contacted and at what point, and no tracking of customers and how they had responded, which made it difficult, if not impossible to understand our marketing impact.”

Compounding the problem, marketing was using a traditional business intelligence system and a hard-to-use SQL server data mart for campaign management. The system was inflexible and difficult to manage—requiring high-level SQL experts to run it—and greatly limited the company in its ability to generate effective, customer-centric campaigns.

“We were doing some brute force campaign management,” said Tompson. “We had a few analysts who knew how to use SQL and they were executing two or three campaigns in a given month—writing SQL scripts and then dumping the results into excel. That was it.”

The solution
U.S. Cellular recognized that the company needed a new approach to campaign management. Following a lengthy internal review to define its needs, the company evaluated vendors with the hope of finding one that had both the vision and technology to address its specific challenges.

Working alongside a technology consulting firm as well as representatives from all facets of U.S. Cellular’s marketing program— marketing analytics, direct marketing, regional marketing, IS and enterprise program management—the company ranked vendors using a set of pre-defined criteria that covered functional requirements as well as their CRM vision.

Ultimately, IBM® Unica®, with its award-winning campaign management solution, IBM Campaign, was selected. Among the factors that led to this decision were IBM Campaign’s:

• Strong campaign design and template functionality: U.S. Cellular needed a solution that would allow it to quickly and cost-effectively design, execute and measure customer interactions.
• Ease of use: The solution had to be logical and intuitive so that it could be used by U.S. Cellular’s existing staff (including both analysts and business users).
• Open and scalable architecture: Integration with the business intelligence solution and other technology the company chose to retain was important, as was the ability to incorporate additional new technologies and products in the future.
• Multi-wave and multi-channel support: U.S. Cellular needed a solution that would allow it to roll out complex campaigns across multiple channels.
• Ability to access multiple data sources: Being able to connect to external data marts and leverage data residing in them was critical.

With IBM Campaign, U.S. Cellular has effectively deployed campaigns across the entire customer lifecycle. These include: regulatory campaigns, customer education and awareness campaigns, cross-sell and up-sell initiatives and retention campaigns.

Example
For wireless providers, reducing churn is of critical importance. To that end, U.S. Cellular is employing IBM Campaign in multi-wave, multichannel campaigns designed to limit attrition and maximize ROI from its existing customer base. The following describes a typical retention campaign. As is common in the wireless industry, U.S. Cellular customers generally enter into a two year contract at the start of service and often renew their contracts to be eligible for highly discounted pricing on new handsets. U.S. Cellular generally targets customers with different types of offers throughout their lifecycle, including cross-sell, up-sell and other offers.

Well before the expiry of their current contract, a customer becomes eligible to obtain a new handset at discounted pricing. At this point, the company begins an aggressive customer retention effort that ensures customers are aware of this opportunity and encourages them to renew their contracts. A direct mail piece is sent to these customers highlighting the availability of new phones and outlining voice plans that might be appropriate for them.

Concurrent with the direct mail drop, customers are sent an SMS message that alerts them to check their mail for the latest offers from U.S. Cellular. This message is not meant to sell, but rather to complement the direct mail channel. Several months later, another direct mail piece is sent to non-responders. Lastly, all non-responders from the first three months are batched up and contacted through a telemarketing campaign designed to provide further encouragement to renew.

“Suffice to say, this can get complex,” said Tompson. “But the beauty of it is that we’re able to reuse our templates, regenerate the code and make minor tweaks as we go. We definitely would not have been able to do this using SQL.”

The results
Significant increase in campaign volume
Prior to IBM Unica, U.S. Cellular analysts executed, analyzed and tracked results for two campaigns per month. Now, analysts execute an average of seven campaigns per month—an increase of 250 percent. The ability to reuse objects and templates has been a major factor in creating new efficiencies and boosting campaign volume.

Improved targeting of customers
IBM Campaign has given U.S. Cellular the ability to target customers with greater precision, producing higher response and conversion rates and increasing return on marketing investment. For example, through advanced modeling and profiling, the company can identify those customers likely to renew their contracts without any marketing effort or investment. This enables the company to cut wasteful spending and maximize ROI.

Enhanced campaign sophistication
With IBM Campaign, U.S. Cellular is able to design and execute more advanced campaigns. Its marketing team can easily merge different audiences or pull in different segments, create multiple cells or multiple versions of campaigns. For instance, with IBM Campaign, U.S. Cellular can now plan, execute and track 30 or more offers in the same campaign.

Improved cycle time and accuracy
Using SQL, it took U.S. Cellular analysts five days—on average—to execute a campaign and measure the results. Cycle time has been greatly reduced with IBM Campaign; campaigns—from development through analysis—now take between 4 and 48 hours to complete.

The future
For U.S. Cellular, the deployment of IBM Campaign is a first step— and an important one—in building an in-house marketing operation that can manage all of its customer communications and interactions.

Next up: the company will be rebuilding its web platform and integrating it with the offline data it collects. “Once this is completed, we’ll want the tools to understand our customer’s web behavior and incorporate that into Campaign,” said Tompson. “That will dramatically increase our sophistication in targeting customers using various channels or responding through various channels.”

The company will also be looking at launching a number of initiatives designed to expand its direct marketing channels and to further automate and streamline its overall marketing operation. “We know that IBM Unica has the vision and expertise to help us—no matter which direction we choose or what challenges we face,” said Tompson. “That gives us a lot of confidence.”

For more information
To learn more about IBM Unica products, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/info/unica.

Smarter Commerce: An integrated approach
IBM Unica products are part of the IBM Smarter Commerce initiative. Smarter Commerce is a unique approach that increases the value companies generate for their customers, partners and shareholders in a rapidly changing digital world. To learn more about Smarter Commerce, visit ibm.com/smarterplanet/commerce.