Bringing customers back home: SLP, Clarify team up to create a dynamic answer to churn

A partnership between two enterprise-focused software companies could result in software that allows carriers to more effectively address customer problems and even combat churn.

Clarify Inc., a company specializing in front-office software, and SLP InfoWare Inc., which creates data mining-enabled customer retention and churn management applications, announced last week that they will merge SLP's churn identification software, the Churn/Customer Profiling System (CPS), with Clarify's suite of customer care applications.

While the two companies are targeting a wide range of industries, telecommunications provides them with a ripe market.

"Customer churn costs mature wireless providers in the U.S. and Europe more than $4 billion annually," said Greg Spurrier, vice president of U.S. operations for SLP. "Our telecommunications customers are going to realize significant value from this partnership because they can give their customer service representatives the ability to identify potential churn customers, measure the customer's lifetime value and react to the situation based on the knowledge provided by Churn/CPS."

Using Churn/CPS, carriers can create "proactive churn prevention programs" to enable customer care representatives to take action before a customer leaves.

While the Churn/CPS system can profile users who are likely to leave, it takes SLP's Knowledge Objects-encapsulated results of the Churn/CPS reports-to get the information to a customer representative, Spurrier said. The Knowledge Objects also can interact with other legacy billing systems and applications written in Visual Basic or C++.

The Knowledge Objects allow customer service representatives in call centers to easily access and then execute individual customer service strategies. For example, the service rep can pull up a customer's service history in Clarify's ClearSupport CommCenter, and SLP's software will calculate that customer's likelihood of switching providers.

SLP's software also will analyze that customer's lifetime value index (how valuable they are as a customer). Based on these indices, the customer service rep can implement various responses, both reactive and proactive, including offering new services free or at a discounted rate.

"Acquiring customers is difficult and expensive, and re-acquiring them is even more so," said Diane Trompeter, group manager for telecommunications at Clarify. "The idea behind this partnership is to create a relationship between the customer and the carrier so that the customer won't leave on a whim."

The system is unique among customer service products in its ability to conduct real-time data mining, allowing customer service representatives to see customers' records in a completely up-to-date form.

The system also gives representatives the ability to handle virtually any service request a customer might have, preventing repeated handoffs between departments within the carrier and further building a relationship with the customer.

Although other anti-churn solutions have been on the market, a pent-up demand for a dynamic solution like this one still existed, said Spurrier. "Other solutions either don't provide an industrial-strength model of churn and don't present it in a dynamic way, or [they] lack the ability to 'operationalize' the data and take it from rows of numbers on a list to information the carrier can act on."

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