DURING the Teradata 2014 Partners Conference & Expo last month, hundreds of companies from all over the world converged on the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee, to share their experiences in big data analytics.
With a tag line of “Data Driven”, the conference brought together about 4,000 business and information technology officers from various corporations, with more than 50 journalists from 18 countries covering the event.
Representatives from companies such as American Airlines, Seven & I Holdings Co Ltd, Far EasTone Telecommunications Co Ltd (FET) and ConocoPhillips shared their experiences in using Teradata’s tools and solutions, and explained how big data analytics have improved their organisations’ business operations.
During a media briefing, Teradata executive vice-president and chief information and marketing officer Bob Fair said, “Data driven businesses regard data as their critical assets, exhibit greater tendencies to make fact-based decisions and perform 5% to 6% better than their peers. But let’s not confuse data driven with more data. Businesses today are data rich, but many of them are insight poor.
“Capturing the data is only one part of the puzzle. Organisations today need the right technology and analytics solutions and, most importantly, the right talents to be able to exploit the insight of the information.”
The winning companies have a clear strategy for data — to get the most out of it. By not having a comprehensive data strategy, a business is admitting that it doesn’t understand the rules of change, Fair surmised.
Today, the challenge is how to integrate data to get the most value from it. With a broad data analytics ecosystem, technology has changed. This really becomes less of a physical issue and more of a virtual and logical issue of integrating data, he said.
Teradata is one of the leading data analytics companies in the world, with a portfolio including integration and orchestration software, advance data analytics platform, big data analytics consulting, and marketing management suite.
FET, DiGi use Teradata’s solutions to enrol 4G services
FET, a Taiwanese telecommunications company, uses big data analytics to find out more about its 3G customers’ behaviour, life stage and life cycle. It then utilises the information in enrolling its 4G network services and products.
Every search using a smartphone generates a URL (uniform resource locator or web address), which is an unstructured data. Combined with all other information on a company’s customers, these are a potential gold mine for telcos.
“For better 4G service roll-out, we do customer data analytics before a service is rolled out. With this analytics, we know what our customers are using their smartphones for, where their locations are, what time they are using their devices, whether or not they are getting good quality services and so on.
“Within four months, we have reached number one in terms of 4G market share by using the big data analytics system provided by Teradata,” said George Chiu, director of business intelligence and analytics in FET.
Based on the data and insights gathered, FET designed new 4G service and products to better appeal to its customers. Through big data analytics, the company managed to locate its stores and build its network coverage in areas with the highest density of its customers in Taiwan.
“For 4G network site construction, we aggregated customers’ 3G data usage by time, location and area, to precisely and efficiently build and expand the network site. This has reduced construction cost and provide the modest capacity in the shortest time frame,” said Chiu.
Among Malaysian companies, DiGi.Com Bhd and Malayan Banking Bhd are the two best known customers of Teradata. DiGi, for one, has expanded its Teradata environment to help it identify optimal network locations for future expansions.
The telco had previously invested in Teradata for an extensive analysis of data pertaining to customer call detail records and customer communications management. This analysis gave the company competitive advantage in providing more complete and effective services to its customers.
“The communications market is fiercely competitive. Data and analytics help provide a competitive edge to improve the customer experience. That’s why Teradata analytic data solutions are the backbone of pervasive, operational and real-time business intelligence for communications service providers,” said Craig Morrisson, Teradata country manager for Malaysia.
“This enables them to carry out detailed analysis and to make strategic and timely tactical decisions that better serve their customers while achieving optimal efficiencies in their operations.”
Maybank, Westpac use Teradata’s solutions to improve customers’ experience
For Maybank, data reuse is essential for managing risk and fraud to maintain capital success. To make more informed decisions, it integrated its customer data with risk and financial data to allow for greater transparency, accuracy and account-level visibility.
With scalability in mind, Maybank created a framework to populate the database with new information in a systematic way, providing a deeper insight into its position in the marketplace.
After considering solutions from Oracle, IBM and SAS, the bank chose database and customer relationship management (CRM) software from Teradata.
As a result, Maybank’s integrated marketing solution now provides a single, centralised view of its clientele. It allows marketing personnel to communicate more effectively with consumers, thereby improving customer acquisition, cultivation, retention, loyalty and profitability.
Australia’s banking group Westpac Banking Corp is continuing to develop industry leading marketing customer relationship management programmes with big data and advanced analytic techniques from Teradata.
Westpac’s customer engagement strategy analyses data to continue to improve customer experience through personalised offers and services. The bank engaged Teradata to partner with it to source new data to further enhance this process.
“We realised early on that this should focus on business outcomes, not solely on technology,” said Rachel Rohrlach, Westpac’s executive manager of CRM capability and strategic marketing.
“Working alongside the Teradata team, we created a vision of the outcomes, quickly proved them and, by engaging information technology, defined the processes and architecture to ensure the technology swiftly delivered on the business promise.”
This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on November 24 - 30, 2014.
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