January 25, 2010

 

NICE Systems, which sells tools to extract insight from interactions, transactions and surveillance, for business performance, reduced risk and safety reasons, has teamed with AnswerOn, which sells customer retention, acquisition and loyalty products to telecoms for a project to give Cincinnati Bell (News - Alert) the joint NICE-AnswerOn Customer Churn Reduction. 

The hosted product integrates NICE Interaction Analytics and transactional data analytics from AnswerOn, NICE officials said.

According to NICE officials, the product lets Cincinnati Bell create “more accurate churn prediction models” by integrating multidimensional analysis results into their churn reduction models. 

“It cross-references customer interaction and transactional data and alerts customer retention personnel in near real-time,” company officials added. 

Cincinnati Bell officials said that they want to build more personalized offers for at-risk customers, deliver the offers in a proactive and timely manner, and perform on-going measurement and monitoring for fine-tuning of churn models and retention offerings effectiveness.

Late last year, NICE was named a winner by Government Security News, or “GSN,” in GSN's first annual Homeland Security Award program in the category of Best Video Storage/Digital Transmission System. The GSN Awards were established to acknowledge excellence in homeland security and the outstanding achievements of security vendors and government agencies at the federal, state and municipal levels.

“We continuously look for ways to increase customer retention,” said Jeff Baker, director of Planning and Support at Cincinnati Bell, saying to do that, “we need to use insights from both customer interactions and from transactional data.”

“For instance, if we see highly emotional calls, combined with a drop in phone usage, this requires our immediate attention or a change in the service package,” Baker added.

Eric Alan Johnson, AnswerOn's president and CEO, said that by integrating data from NICE's Interaction Analytics, the company was able to increase the accuracy of its predictive model by 30 percent, resulting in an forecasted increase of 61 percent in saved revenue over the next 12 months.

Retaining subscribers is vital in an industry where a two percent monthly churn rate can result in many millions of dollars lost on a monthly basis, “even for mid-sized service providers,” said Barak Eilam (News - Alert), president of Interactions Business Applications at NICE.