Cable marketer attributes sales gains to CRM upgrade
MediaOne has achieved double-digit sales increases in two of its six markets with a CRM initiative begun in 1999.
It all started when the cable programming marketer, which was acquired by AT&T in June, realized that it had to better manage its 200 million customer contacts per year.
As with many firms, MediaOne’s marketing data warehouse was not integrated with its sales and service centers. Its inbound touch points relied on the firm’s billing system. In addition, the company segmented customers almost totally by geography. Finally, there was a “strategy gap” between promotions done by the firm and what its salespeople said directly to customers.
But it had to improve. MediaOne had new products to sell – high-speed Internet access (introduced in 1997) and digital phone service (first offered in 1998). It also felt pressure from Wall Street to “grab land share,” said Mark Voboril, vice president for CRM and e-marketing at AT&T Broadband, Englewood, CO, speaking last month at the National Center for Database Marketing conference in Las Vegas.
One important feature of the multistage customer relationship management program is segment identification. MediaOne believed that 70% of its revenue eventually would come from segments not represented in its current base.
“We spent time [learning about] the database,” said Voboril.
Another big element was conversion to Rightpoint call center software and to intelligent scripting. MediaOne’s call centers handle inbound sales and service calls, and outbound telemarketing.
Telephone agents are now able to pull up a customer’s record on their computers and log in the reason for the call. They also can ask marketing-related questions, which may determine the products that will be cross-sold, said Larry Goldberg, senior director at Broadband Software, Natick, MA. Information is served up from an Oracle database.
This has vastly improved MediaOne’s segmentation capabilities. Normally, the firm performs three times better than random in predicting segment membership, according to Voboril. The addition of a few questions ups the rate to four to five times better than random. The call center upgrades have led to a 10% to 15% hike in cross selling.
MediaOne also has deployed Market Switch, a channel optimization tool. It enabled the firm to instantly determine what the minimum and maximum offers should be, cost per sale and more.
Market Switch produced an 11% boost in telephone product sales plus several hundred more incremental high-speed data customers. This improvement is due, in large part, to the fact that the firm can now target by propensities.
But it’s a work in progress. Next year, MediaOne hopes to increase integration with its field sales staff.
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