Reliance Communications: Analytics-driven Usage and Retention Capability

Accenture helps Reliance Communications achieve high performance through an analytics-driven usage and retention capability.

Over the past few years, the telecom industry in India has grown rapidly and has become highly dynamic on the back of a large customer base. This has resulted in the growth of a multiple service providers which in turn has created a highly competitive telecom market. The saturation in new customer markets and the increase of multi-SIM usage along with other factors have spurred customer churn and also negatively impact the average revenue per user (ARPU).

Reliance Communications (RCom) is one of India’s largest private sector information and communications companies, with more than 150 million subscribers. To increase its revenue from the CDMA pre-paid voice business, RCom sought to team up with a company with demonstrated experience in the telecom domain, with proven analytics capability and experience in delivering results. 

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The company needed to develop a strategy for enhancing revenue and identified subscriber churn and ARPU enhancement as potential high-impact areas to gain a competitive advantage and build revenues.

RCom determined its strategy needed to focus on intelligent usage and retention (U&R) through a better understanding of its customer base and by tailoring differentiated products at varying prices across customer segments. Accenture, with its global experience in segmentation, predictive churn modeling, analytics-based U&R programs and program execution, was the leading choice for this collaboration.

RCom and Accenture embarked on a 15-month journey to strengthen the company’s U&R program by focusing on three major initiatives:

• Augmenting existing analytical capabilities

• Designing and developing a structured usage and retention program capability

• Implementing innovative delivery channels

The aim of the project was to improve the effectiveness of the company’s retention, up-sell and cross-sell campaigns among its prepaid CDMA (wireless communications technology) customer base.

To gain a better understanding of this customer base, Accenture helped RCom develop an analytics solution based on a demonstrated approach to categorize customers, create predictive models and design action plans. With this, Accenture helped RCom create a single view of the customer from disparate data sources, develop processes to refresh the data on a periodic basis and build intelligent analytical models.

With the completion of these analytical deliverables, Accenture worked with RCom to use the insights from them to design an analytics-driven marketing campaign framework and on-the-ground execution steps as the core of RCom’s U&R program.

Working with Accenture, RCom has built a robust U&R program based on analytics-driven marketing. It has helped RCom to take a scientific approach to understanding, segmenting, improving product marketing campaigns, and consequently, serve its customers better. Through a combination of incremental revenues and process improvements, the project led to US$4.2 million of benefit in the first eight months (annualized benefit of US$7.4 million in the first year of the program) to RCom.

Today, RCom’s enhanced U&R capability helps the company understand customer needs at a micro level and offer targeted, exclusive products to incentivize customers to increase usage of the prepaid CDMA SIM for making calls, sending messages and other services. This program was a one of its kind in the market and has helped create a differentiator in the market for RCom, leading to customers staying longer with RCom, and thus, helping to deliver higher revenues to the company.

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