Easing into long-distance: U S West taps into database marketing

One of the challenges for Bell regional holding companies entering the long-distance market will be deciding whom to target.

"In the long-distance industry, you need to understand which customers are profitable," said John Pitek, vice president of marketing for U S West's long-distance unit.

Without that understanding, carriers risk spending more on acquisition and win-back offers than they earn in usage charges, said Pitek. Yet RHCs are prevented from using information from their local exchange operations to support marketing programs for long-distance-unless a customer has given permission to do so.

U S West's current long-distance marketing efforts are focused on a corporate calling card and an express calling card, as well as on being the underlying long-distance carrier for its sister unit's PCS offering, said Pitek. Information from the card offering will be used to determine heavy users, he added.

Another goal is to encourage customers to use wireless phones to make more long-distances calls. The telco uses another carrier to handle the in-region intraLATA portion of the traffic.

To support its long-distance efforts for business customers, U S West is using data from Dun & Bradstreet to predict a company's minutes of use and the depth of its product needs, said Pitek. To target consumers, the carrier is using demographic and lifestyle information from R.L. Polk, he said, adding that the carrier has found a correlation between heavy long-distance use and customers with call waiting and caller ID.

To support its marketing people and statisticians, U S West Long-Distance is using the Strategist decision support product from Kenan Systems Corp. as a front-end to its own internal data warehouse. The carrier was impressed by the system's ease of use, said Pitek.

The Strategist system also could help carriers create their own data warehouses, said Lou La Rocca, co-director of Kenan's decision support business unit. "It has its own independent data model that is optimized for this type of analysis," said La Rocca.

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