Client
Bouygues Telecom
On the Web
www.bouyguestelecom.fr Project
Customer Insight Implementation
Shortcut to
Business Challenge
How Accenture Helped
High Performance
Delivered Executive Summary
Facing a maturing market, intense competition and more sophisticated customers, Bouygues Telecom needed a new approach to customer acquisition and retention. With sophisticated customer insight capabilities enabled by
Accenture, Bouygues can now analyze customer data more granularly, predict
customer behavior more accurately and calculate the cost/response ratio for
marketing campaigns more precisely.
Business
Challenge France's mobile telephony industry has experienced enormous
growth during the last few years, with new customers eagerly embracing mobile
technology in droves. Growth, however, has not come cheaply. The costs to
acquire new mobile phone users in France are among the highest in Europe, due
to carriers' heavy subsidizing of handset and retailer costs to make it easier
for new users to sign up for service.
As a result, carriers many face a pressing need to maximize
their average return per user (ARPU) by retaining their best customers for as
long as possible. This challenge is particularly acute in the face of slowing
growth due to market saturation and the impending expiration of many original
customers' service plans.
Bouygues Telecom knows the situation well. Serving more
than 5 million wireless customers, the company had enjoyed dramatic growth in
market share in the past five years. However, the company knew it could not
count on customer acquisition to increase or even maintain its 18 percent share
of the French mobile market. The company believed its future success would
depend on winning the battle for the customer by:
- Increasing each customer's mobile phone
usage.
- Increasing the sales of additional services to each
user.
- Increasing the length of each customer relationship to
generate greater customer lifetime revenues.
- Steering customers to other Bouygues products and services if
all efforts to keep them as mobile customers fail.
Achieving these goals, however, would require a significant
change in the way Bouygues operated, to achieve high-performance results that
would beat the competition. For example, to match service offerings to current
and emerging customer needs, the company needed to learn much more about each
customer. To increase the chance of converting a marketing lead to a sale, the
company had to deliver better-targeted marketing messages. None of this,
however, would be possible using the same mass-marketing, mass-acquisition
model Bouygues had first used to capitalize on a growing market.
How Accenture
Helped Bouygues Telecom teamed with Accenture to take its business to higher levels of performance by improving customer acquisition and retention methods. The company chose Accenture because of our
extensive experience in the telecommunications industry with creating and
immediately acting on customer and business insights.
The Bouygues/Accenture team began the project by defining
the data Bouygues would need to analyze and predict customer behavior, identify
consumer trends and pinpoint need for particular products or services. Next,
the team defined a more narrowly segmented customer base, to make target
marketing easier. Bouygues had already defined three basic customer segments,
but this segmentation was not granular enough to provide in-depth insights into
specific customer needs. To complement these segments, the project team defined
several hundred "customer clusters"—smaller groups of customers with similar
needs and behaviors.
After generating new customer and business insights, the
team developed a marketing plan and supporting processes to shift Bouygues
Telecom from mass marketing to a few large segments to "real-time" marketing
that put new insight into action by addressing the needs of individual customer
clusters. Real-time marketing optimized the use of the myriad communication
channels Bouygues uses to reach customers, including: customers' mobile phones,
monthly bill inserts, Bouygues’ corporate magazine, letters, e-mails and
personalized Web sites.
To complete the solution, the team developed an innovative
marketing automation system. This asset is critical to the success of the
project because it helps manage the complexity of Bouygues' new marketing
approach, which encompasses three customer segments, hundreds of customer
clusters and multiple offers communicated through eight to ten different
interaction channels.
High Performance
Delivered As a result of the project—which took just 10 months to
complete—Bouygues Telecom has significantly bolstered its ability to create
lasting customer relationships. In fact, the company's retention program is the
first of its kind for a mobile telephony business in France. With its new
processes and technology, Bouygues can now analyze customer data more
granularly, predict customer behavior more accurately and calculate the
cost/response ratio for marketing campaigns more precisely.
Mastering these new capabilities has translated into a
number of quantifiable business benefits. The number of customer contacts is up
450 percent, the accuracy of segmentation has tripled, and the time needed to
create and execute a marketing campaign has been reduced by 75 percent. And,
perhaps most important, Bouygues' ARPU has gone from last to first among
telecom companies in France.
These strong new customer retention capabilities give
Bouygues Telecom a powerful competitive advantage in a market that will only
get tougher to succeed in during the coming years.
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