2degrees Gets a 1275 Percent Boost in Churn Identification
2degrees is New Zealand’s fastest growing mobile telecommunications company. In less than 3 years, they have transformed the landscape of New Zealand’s mobile telecommunications market. Entering very much as the challenger and battling with incumbents entrenched in the market for over 18 years, 2degrees has won over 580,000 customers and has revenues of more than $100 million in just their third year of operation. Last year’s growth was 3761 percent.
Situation
2degrees’ information solutions manager, Peter McCallum, explains that predictive analytics had been on the radar at the company for some time. “At 2degrees there are a lot of analytically aware people, from the CEO down. Once we got to the point in our business that we were interested in deploying advanced predictive analytics techniques, we started to look at what was available in the marketplace.” It soon became clear that although on paper there were several options, the reality was that the cost of deploying the well-known solutions made it very difficult to build a business case, particularly given that the benefits to the business were as yet unproven.
After careful evaluation, 2degrees decided upon a suite of analytics solutions from 11Ants consisting of Customer Response Analyzer, Customer Churn Analyzer, and Model Builder. “One of the beauties of the 11Ants Analytics solution was that it allowed us to get up and running quickly and very economically. We could test the water and determine what the ROI was likely to be for predictive analytics, making it a lot easier to build a business case for future analytics projects,” Peter McCallum said.
When asked why they chose 11Ants Analytics’ solutions, Peter said, “One of the beauties of the 11Ants Analytics solution was that it allowed us to get up and running quickly and very economically. We could test the water and determine what the ROI was likely to be for predictive analytics, making it a lot easier to build a business case for future analytics projects. Yet we didn’t really have to sacrifice anything in terms of functionality—in fact, the churn models we’ve built have performed exceptionally well.”
11Ants analytics director of Business Development, Tom Fuyala, comments: “We are dedicated to getting organizations up and running with predictive analytics faster, without compromising the quality of the results. With other solutions you must [use] trial and error through multiple algorithms manually, but with 11Ants Analytics solutions, the entire optimization and management of the algorithms is automated, allowing thousands to be trialed in a few minutes. The benefits of this approach are evidenced in the real-world results.”
Peter is also impressed by the ease of use. “The simplicity was a big deal to us. Not having to have the statistical knowledge in-house was definitely a selling point. Company culture was also a big factor in our decision making. 11Ants Analytics felt like a good fit. They’ve been very responsive and have been great to work with. The turnaround on some of the custom requests we have made has been fantastic.”
Peter also likes the fact that models can be built with the desktop modeling tools and then deployed against the enterprise customer database with 11Ants Predictor. “Once the model has been built, it is easy to deploy it in 11Ants Predictor to run against Oracle and score our entire customer base very quickly. The speed with which 11Ants Predictor can re-score hundreds of thousands of customers is fantastic. We presently re-score our customer base monthly, but it is so easy that we could be re-scoring daily if we wanted.”
Benefits
2degrees put 11Ants Analytics solutions to work quickly with very satisfying results. The initial project was to focus on an all-too-common problem in the mobile telecommunications industry: customer churn (customers leaving). For this they deployed 11Ants Customer Churn Analyzer. 2degrees was interested in identifying customers most at risk of churning by analyzing data such as time on network, days since last top-up, activation channel,