20 Apr Warid Telecom Gets Ready For The 4g Era With Business Intelligence Driven Marketing

South Asia’s first PureData powered by Netezza technology implementations is used by Warid to know its customers intimately

Warid Telecom is part of the billion dollar Abu Dhabi group. For over a decade Warid has a reputation for providing best in class voice and data services in Pakistan as one of the “Big Five” mobile service providers. Its large postpaid customer base not only gets superior voice quality but also lightning fast 4G LTE data services. However, to increase uptake of Value Added Services, provide superior customer service and react quickly to market opportunities it had to know its customers intimately.

The IT infrastructure in place sourced for superior voice offerings was struggling to enable this and to keep up with demands of new business strategies in the 4G era. Campaign management had lots of issues, as customer data was not formalized. Strategies for stopping customer churn were increasingly ineffective because relevant data could not be trusted or sliced and diced as needed. Querying for a report meant you would get it next business day! While on one end increasing data was putting pressure on the storage infrastructure, on the other hand targeted marketing was impossible because data was simply not usable for profiling.

Our consultants got engaged with Warid in response to an RFP requesting a relevant campaign management solution. We were able to convince Warid that in the VAS era it was essential that whatever solution was proposed was highly flexible yet scalable across the infrastructure and application stack. We understood Warid’s pain points and built on powerful architectural foundations; a solution that would be simple by design yet carrier grade in robustness and flexible to adapt to any market dynamic. We also understood that emerging market telecoms are subjected to uncertainty levels from regulators, markets, geo political and security events and an unpredictable VAS scenario.

InfoTech then came up with a solution that had the bleeding edge IBM PureData System for Analytics powered by Netezza technology at its core. This was one of the most powerful optimized integrated business intelligence systems in the world. Fully redundant at all levels with built in deduplication it was perfect for mission critical workloads. It came with an inherent ETL tool which extracted relevant data and fed it to Netezza, an embedded purpose built advanced analytics format. Built in powerful Cognos technology allows for complete, unified, consistent and accurate information that gave highly customized reports per function. This was not just an IT solution. It was a pivotal piece in moving Warid from a voice driven organization to a data driven one. After the PureData Netezza Cognos solution Warid moved the needle from being data rich and information poor, to insight driven based on actionable intelligence gathered from data it could now trust.

With this solution, marketing gets the information they need which is actionable. This allows them to run targeted highly effective marketing campaigns with superior segmentation and targeting. The most profitable customers are identified and retention strategies enabled allowing for customer churn to go down. Reporting is now near-real time contributing to a telecom provider, which despite its large size is agile in its ability to react to the market.