Sprint develops marketing intelligence solution

Software Magazine, Spring, 2002 by Elizabeth U. Harding

Fueled by the Internet and its ability to open up avenues for new types of customer demands, the telecommunication industry is becoming ever more competitive. Today's battle for customers is intense. The challenge for a large telecommunications company like Sprint, for instance, is to stay flexible, to anticipate trends, and to meet constantly shifting desires of customers.

"When you have 23 million customers to serve, that's no easy task," says Pam Crumpler, director of marketing and communications, Sprint MkIS (Marketing Information Solutions), Dallas. "It became very clear that we needed to understand our marketplace better. We needed a way to get to our information very rapidly, integrate it, and be able to profile our customers and prospects."

Tired of slow access to Sprint's diverse customer databases with an existing CRM system, the MkIS business unit a few years ago embarked on a project that entailed developing a marketing intelligence solution the company calls MarketMine. After taking a look at the various CRM offerings, Sprint MkIS decided on the SAS Solution for CRM, an analytical application from SAS Institute Inc., Cary, N.C.

"We talked to so many different companies [about CRM]," says Crumpler. "Everybody that offered us something out of the box was missing this or that. When SAS entered the picture, they allowed us the flexibility to identify our needs and build a solution according to our needs."

Flexibility in Crumpler's dictionary means customization capabilities, ease of use, and finding a vendor to work with to complete the project on time. MarketMine today is an integration of the SAS Solution for CRM and Sprint's marketing databases running on Oracle, Crumpler says.

CRM projects can take a long time. MkIS was shooting for a 12-month project, but it stretched to 18 months. However, when the project was finished, Crumpler says it had all the complexity built in.

"We are implementing a marketing segmentation initiative which we could not have done in the old environment," says Crumpler. "What used to take us weeks to do is now taking us days and in some cases hours to generate the same type of information. Our new CRM system is productive and efficient."

Moreover, Crumpler says, the solution is saving the company money. According to a return-on-investment scenario, MkIS estimated that Sprint would save over $1 million in an 8-month time frame on outside processing charges because all information could now be processed in-house.