For a dozen years, Scorecard Systems Inc.’s mantra and mission have been to provide a single version of the truth for service providers to accurately report their numbers. The Sarbanes-Oxley bill since has made this an imperative and competition has driven the requirement beyond reporting to intelligence gathering.
Scorecard has gone on to develop plug-in applications for revenue assurance, usage statistics, commissioning, trouble ticketing, cost analysis as well as front-end tools that allow customers to slice and dice data themselves. But the heart of its solution and the reason the company teamed with Teradata to service Frontier Communications recently is all about subscriber analysis.
Frontier, the second largest rural local exchange carrier — at least until the CenturyTel and Embarq deal closes — now is using Teradata’s Active Enterprise Data Warehouse and Scorecard Systems’ subscriber analysis application to gain better insight into customer behavior.
Understanding customer behavior sometimes is misunderstood as getting into the minds of customers somehow, but this is more about understanding what it means that 500 customers added, say, messaging last week. It’s about knowing how to categorize that action and make strategic use of it.
CEOs may want to know how many activations they got in Des Moines the day before, but they’re likely to get different answers depending on whether they are asking sales, finance or marketing. “They may get the same number at a high level, but as soon as they get down to how many bought what rate plan or were sold by what sales person, the whole thing falls apart,” said Simon Marwood, CEO of Scorecard Systems.
Frontier is looking for significantly more insight into its customer and product movement. Scott DeLap, director of financial systems and reporting at Frontier, said the combination of a Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse and Scorecard’s Subscriber Analysis Application gives the company great visibility into the needs and usage patterns of its customer base.
“Traditionally, fixed-line carriers have relied upon hard-coded reporting platforms that do not give deep insight into value-added service and bundled activity,” DeLap said. “In contrast, our new deployment gives Frontier accurate, auditable and deep insight into migration paths, feature-level churn and other key metrics.”
He added that the Teradata platform allows Frontier to link this data with all of its other key enterprise information and to process it quickly.
“We have a strong partnership with Teradata that lets us leverage both companies’ strengths,” Marwood said. “With the sheer volume of data we are working with it helps to be able to churn through the data at a rapid pace so when the customer comes in the next morning it is all there for them.”