SPSS Selected by Virgin Mobile for CRM, Churn Avoidance

Virgin Mobile, the British virtual network operator, has selected predictive analytics software to drive marketing campaign optimization and reduce customer churn.

The software from SPSS (News - Alert) is supposed to let Virgin Mobile "analyze its customer data and the results of previous direct marketing campaigns to identify appropriate customer segments for new marketing initiatives" targeted at the mobile operator's 4 million customers, according to Virgin officials.

Virgin Mobile undertakes more than 100 marketing campaigns each year. By identifying the most appropriate customers for each of these, the mobile operator hopes to be able to lower campaign costs, reduce customer churn and increase revenue per user from event-triggered marketing activities.

So customers who add additional minutes by a certain amount and are likely to churn can be sent a text message reminding them of the benefits of a rewards scheme, at or close to the time they re-up their minutes, rather than within an ad hoc campaign.

Basically, Virgin Mobile hopes to be able to better predict the likelihood of a customer leaving and take measures to prevent this. Caroline Schmidt, CVM controller at Virgin Mobile, says the SPSS' predictive analytics "enables us to get closer to our customers and predict which campaign will work best for each one."

Customers only receive the communications they are likely to respond to and "we achieve higher response rates and a greater return on investment for each campaign," Schmidt explains. "This is true next-generation CRM."

Earlier this month CallMiner, a speech analytics vendor, and SPSS announced they have joined forces.

By aligning CallMiner's speech analytics product, CallMiner Eureka!, with the SPSS predictive enterprise platform, CallMiner and SPSS hope to sell businesses the ability "to not only determine why customers are calling and how calls are handled, but also to take that analysis a step further to determine future customer behavior," according to CallMiner officials.

CallMiner Eureka! is a speech analytics product designed to analyze and report on the content, context, purpose and result of recorded conversations handled by contact center agents. Company officials say it can mine and analyze "every word of every call," as well as captures acoustic data (tempo, silence and stress), meta-data and customer information to provide "a complete picture of all calls and their outcomes."

SPSS sells predictive analytics technology to give organizations "on-demand insight" into both structured and unstructured data, such as call center notes, e-mail, blogs and Wikis. The addition of voice data is a move to let SPSS text mine "huge repositories of untapped information and, at the same time, factor in important attributes like voice stress and emotion," SPSS officials say.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) Net.  For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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