TalkTalk to deploy Unica to simplify campaign management

Telephony provider says SAS analytics created a 'datadump' which made it difficult to analyse customer data and run campaigns

UK broadband and telephony provider TalkTalk is to deploy IBM-owned Unica's software to improve its customer marketing strategies and better manage its customer databases.

In an interview with Computing, head of customer lifecycle management at TalkTalk Carlos Soares said that the company had been using SAS analytics software for its campaigns, and that this was proving to be time-consuming and ineffectual.

"We have SAS which brings a whole bunch of data sets together, but not in a database, more like a ‘datadump' of information, making it extremely difficult for us to do an analysis of customer data and run campaigns.

"When we have used SAS for marketing campaigns it has given us a multitude of pages of code. I think I saw 12 or 13 pages, which is ridiculous as it is so manually intensive [to go through them]," he added.

Claire Pritchard, head of data strategy at TalkTalk, said that another issue with the amount of code was human error.

"If you put in a typo where there are many pages of code, you could accidently include customers [in a campaign] that you are supposed to be suppressing and vice versa," she explained.

Soares said that TalkTalk is trying to put together a marketing database which is robust and can measure data quality, so it looked for a tool that could consolidate data effectively.

He said that TalkTalk looked at a number of possibilities before selecting Unica.

"We looked at the Pega CRM system, SAS campaign manager and a Neolane offering. Many telcos use Unica and, having had a look at the possibilities, Unica was better for functionality, integration and a future roadmap.

"TalkTalk needs it to be future proof. With the modules that Unica has it helps us to integrate with other systems. Future proofing is important, I don't want a dead end product, which Pega would have been," Soares explained.

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TalkTalk to deploy Unica to simplify campaign management

Telephony provider says SAS analytics created a 'datadump' which made it difficult to analyse customer data and run campaigns

TalkTalk is currently building data feeds to go into IBM-owned Netezza's data warehouse, and Soares added that his team is working with Netezza's internal IT group to develop the system.

The Database Group (DBG), who will help to build the database, will then pull that data out of its warehouse and create a marketing database on an SQL server.

Pritchard was adamant that the Unica software will help TalkTalk to manage its content better.

"Previously we only offered one or two packages, but now we offer legacy packages as well as mobile, fibre and, by the end of the year, TV. So we can't bombard customers with all of the offers. Content management is very important and it is currently very hard to do, so Unica will help us with that," she said.

Soares explained that Unica will help create a marketing database to simplify campaigns, allow more robust data quality measures and help to enforce service level agreements to allow TalkTalk to deliver data at the right time.

He also said there was a wider business impact from the solution.

"People in the business will use [the marketing database] to do other things that they weren't previously able to do," he claimed.

TalkTalk, which will retain SAS for analytics and use QlikView as a reporting tool, hopes to complete the project by the end of the year.

According to Soares and Pritchard, the next step for the telephone services provider would be to add more of Unica's capabilities to the solution and then integrate it with social media and other IBM solutions, such as Coremetrics.