Telstra turns to data to reduce customer churn

The tech behind the scenes

Drummond told iTnews that the primary tool he relies on is the SAS Enterprise Miner for a lot of the modelling work, in unison with the SAS Enterprise Guide which brings that data in from a number of sources.

Underpinning all of this is a Teradata enterprise data warehouse which takes feeds from Telstra’s Siebel CRM and its billing system.

At the user end of operations, the Telstra CMO office now has access to Accenture’s Agile Marketing Analytics Platform (AMAP), a web-based interface which allows marketing managers and media buyers to run their own investment optimisations from their desktop, and to look retrospectively at slices of data and also test hypothetical scenarios.

Telstra also recently deployed IBM’s Unica campaign management system to feed off the results of the number crunching done by Drummond and his team.

A role for IT?

Curiously, all of these systems are being deployed and managed outside the remit of Telstra's IT department.

The centralisation of all of Telstra’s marketing functions roughly two years ago resulted in the establishment of the data analytics division, which boasts its own data and technology team within the marketing group.

Drummond says they have a “dotted line from the Chief Technology Officer into marketing” which is producing “much better synergies with IT”, but he thinks that the current model is the right fit.

“I think a lot of organisations are recognising that there is a need to have analytics skills within marketing, as marketing is getting to be a bigger and bigger user of data in organisations.

“If it sits just in IT you get really sound data, and a really sound process but you might miss out on some of that business context.

“Having an analytics team within marketing means that you get that business context alongside the analytics. It is a more structured answer to whatever the business problem might be.”