Dodo adapts to market with business intelligence

M2 Telecommunications consumer director, Boris Rozenvasser, says knowledge is key to running a good business.

Dodo has adjusted marketing and its range of energy and telecom services over the last three years based on insights learned from a business intelligence (BI) platform, according to M2 Telecommunications consumer director, Boris Rozenvasser.

“The key to running a good business is to have lots of knowledge and information, so we certainly rely on knowing lots about our customers and lots about their usage patterns,” Rozenvasser told CIO Australia.

“The more information we have and the easier it is accessed, the easier we can manage processes within the company.”

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Dodo has data about sales, cancellations, customer usage and more, he said.

Sales data helps Dodo understand what service customers are buying, Rozenvasser said. Dodo can correlate the data with marketing to determine which ads are working and which are not, he said. The telco can drill down to a particular postcode and see if a billboard or kiosk is performing better, for example, he said.

By analysing cancellation data, Dodo can “drill down to the reason the customer is cancelling” and attempt to resolve the problem. If the customer is leaving because they are moving to an area with no service, Dodo can investigate why it does not have service there, he said.

The company has adjusted some of its service offerings based on insights from BI. For example, Dodo used to offer three telephony plans but now offers only two. “After analysing the plans and what customers were choosing, we could see one of the plans wasn’t being chosen by customers and wasn’t competitive enough,” he said.

Also, Dodo shortened the contract length of a gas and electricity bundle plan in Victoria from 36 months to 12 months after learning from data that it was not selling well. After finding that customers were staying well past 12 months, Dodo scrapped the contract altogether, he said.

Dodo has policies to protect customer privacy and uses BI to ensure it does not bother customers with unwanted marketing, said Rozenvasser.

“All data is securely stored and accessed only when needed and must be identified before giving out any personal information,” he said.

“Any campaigns that we do to market to our customers is washed against any unsubscribe list or any do-not-call or do-not-mail lists to make sure we only communicate to customers who want [to receive messages],” he said. “BI is pretty integral to that to make sure we get the right data.”

Dodo has used a BI platform from Infoready for the past three years. Before that, it relied on reports from a transactional billing system.

“We were putting a lot of load in having to access the same data from the same database that our customer service representatives are using,” he said. “And also it wasn’t able to provide large amounts of data.”

The BI system allowed to Dodo “slice and dice” large amounts of data without having to do IT development “every time we wanted to look at something different,” he said.

Dodo chose Infoready due to price and the support the vendor was willing to provide to set up the system, Rozenvasser said.

“They provided excellent in-house service,” he said. “They put a person in with us to make sure they understood our data and our requirements very well. They helped us keep that person even for another six months for any improvements and enhancements that we made.”

Rozenvasser said the platform has had major benefits for the business.

“We’ve been quite happy not to use development resources to get the information that we need,” he said. “It empowers business decision makers to be able to analyse data without having to request data extracts from IT teams, enabling the path to informed decision making based on accurate and timely information.”

While Dodo was recently acquired by M2, it will continue to use the Infoready BI platform for its consumer services, Rozenvasser said. M2’s business-focused iPrimus uses a different BI.

“We’ll be having a look over the next six to 12 months at the integration work required between the two, but they are still run as two separate businesses,” he said.

Follow Adam Bender on Twitter: @WatchAdam