Vodafone and data warehousing: A translation of that abstract

<cynic mode firmly switched on, with apologies to Rachel>

Via Mauricio, it seems from this, that Vodafone  are using data warehousing techniques to drive customer retention. I’ve had a go at interpreting the abstract of “The Customer Retention Journey at Vodafone New Zealand” below. Speaker Rachel Harrison is the Vodafone Lead Analyst who is giving (in Las Vegas) and gave the presentation – she is a SAS and data warehouse pro. Apparently the presentations were made avaialble to Teradata Universe conference atendees – so if you are resourceful then you may be able to find one.

A translation of the abstract

Vodafone is the leading mobile provider in New Zealand (NZ). NZ currently has 2 mobile competitors and over 100 % market penetration.

We are part of another cosy Kiwi duopoly. It’s nice – secure profits for both companies. Isn’t the iPhone cool?! we have the most expensive plans in he world!!

NZ’ders are early adopters of new technologies and our products constantly change and evolve.

But not as fast as other parts of the world which have real competition – see below.

We now have a shift to focusing on Customer Retention.

Because Telecom is shortly going to “compete” with us using current, rather than obsolete, technology. Our collegues in Europe are working on much crunchier problems, which frankly we would like to work on as well. Here’s a quote from collegue Nebahat Donmez : “In highly saturated telecommunications markets with a lot of competition, post-pay consumers revise their contract decisions easily anytime without giving much importance to the brand”.

With the completion of our new Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) we are well on the way in our Customer Retention journey.

We’ve built a big expensive data warehouse, justified on customer retention numbers (a little change means a lot of dollars), but have not done anything with it yet. It’s nice to be in the news for something other than our lousy billing system transtion though. Oh – and this may have been a bit of a corporate manadate as it seems Vodafone use this world-wide.

The new EDW has richer data available to constantly improve our retention programmes.

There is heaps of data in the warehouse and we can’t wait to get going on it.

New products and behaviours flow into the EDW for use in modelling and analysis.

Even more data is being added to the warehouse every day. It’s pretty overwhelming actually.

KXEN has enabled us to develop models quickly to ensure we are constantly including new customer behaviours.

We outsourced a bunch of our work to KXEN, “The data mining automation company” and are still paying them today. It seems Vodafone use them all over the world as well – nice contract.

We now have an iterative modelling process that allows us to keep up with the changing market.

We are a group inside the monolithic Vodafone that analyses and helps retain clusters of people and fee groups. We focus on keeping the ones that give us lots of money and look at things like the intensity of a cusotmer’s calling circle along with credit history. But we are a really smart bunch, and what we really wish is that we were allowed to craft products that deliver what people really want rather than just focus on stopping them from leaving when our policies and procedures piss people off. We can’t, so we do what we can.

SAS has direct against to the EDW and allows us to push queries back to Teradata to speed up analysis.

We can keep using SAS, thankfully, to do our analysis without having to resort to the Tertadata interface that is new.

The retention journey is ongoing; however with our new EDW and toolset we are confident of success.

We have had no results so far. Sorry.

The Warehouse also gave a talk at the Teradata Universe- Ray Renner is the Stock Systems and Process Manager – His Abstract was simply:

Leveraging Teradata Demand Chain Management in a Discount Department Store environment.

much better.

Chocolate fish, bloggers and a tragic death

Horrible news from the inquest of Chocolate Fish landlord Adrianus Johanus Vlug, who the coroner found committed suicide after feeling pressure from “rather uninformed bloggers” about the rent increases at the chocolate fish.

bloggers criticised
bloggers criticised

From that point onward, a series of Facebook blog articles appeared mostly condemning the landlord for having a ‘greedy’ attitude with respect to rent increases,” the inquest found.

Those uninformed bloggers were informed in part by a Dom Post article on September 13th, which stated

In its decade of operation, the rent had gone up from “a couple of hundred dollars a week” to $2000 a week, for just 86 square metres.

AND

On top of the rental, Mr Wright said the council planned to upgrade the beachside car parks and had told the cafe its share of the costs would be $40,000 to $60,000.

AND

The cafe was also paying $18,000 a year to the council to lease the seaside cafe space and the area under the canopy – a charge introduced this year.

So the CF cafe faced $180,000 in costs per year, which is a lot for a sleepy cafe that only goes big in the summer.

Meanwhile the CF Facebook entry is pretty innocent, but Save the Chocolate Fish Cafe and SAVE CHOCOLATE FISH CAFE!!!!!!!!!!! are a bit less so. Almost all posts merely express regret and nostalgia, and only a few target the landlord or the council – in about equal numbers. (I’m obviously not seeing any deleted posts). There are essentially no new facts introduced – so perhaps the worst posts have indeed been deleted.

Those of us who live online know that ranting and trolling is a fact of life – there was, for example, an excellent troll by someone pretending to be the Starbucks head of acquisitions, which a few people fell for. But for the 69 year old owner it all may have come across as personal attacks, and he tragically took his own life.

A severe warning for everyone in media – whether informal or formal – to get the facts right and to avoid ad-hominen attacks.

My heart goes out to Mr. Vlug’s family.

Excellent Samsung viral campaign

I was surprised to hear about my togs stealing exploits – but kudos to Samsung and their agencies for an excellent campaign.I received a link to a fake NZ news site….

Cleverly my details are inserted into the video, along with the name or the perpetrator that dobbed me in.

It all links back to a Samsung/Olympics site – with some sort of competition.

Tired up



IMG_0020, originally uploaded by y_kiwi.

picked up two tires today – a Karroo (like the one with a screw in it, but still a very capable tire) and the Dunlop D908 Rally Raid – that’s top left.

The D908’s were made for pretty much exactly what I’ll be doing – allbeit at much faster speeds and with a little less mass on board. It is Dunlop’s version of the Michelin Desert, and seeing as Michelin is so lame as to have none of their tires in stock, well, Dunlop has a new committed customer.
Thanks to the Five Star Yamaha, local Yamaha dealer – the service dept. is run by an ex BMW guy who understood exactly what I was doing, and even gave me the handy hint on how to safely carry two tires without wearing them.

Telcos: stay out of the content game

Via Stuff, and the SMH, a headline that seemingly spells bad news for the iPhone in Australia: “iPhone not so multimedia friendly in Aust”

The article goes on to say that the iPhone is unable to play many of the Telco giants mobile offerings, such as Vodafone Live, Telstra’s Big Pond TV or Optus’ ringtones or mobile TV channels.

So what. The news is that these services are not really wanted – and have only been used to date because it has been too hard and to expensive to do anything else with your phone. This walled garden approach went the way of AOL years ago in internet space, and so it should in mobile internet space.

I’ll keep saying this forever – Telecom, Telstra, Optus, AT&T and Vodafone should stay out of the content game and in the provision of decent network game. As soon as they enter the content game then they are competing against the entire internet – and that’s a game they will lose.

The internet ISP’s are increasingly realising this – witness the gradual demise of Xtra’s web services in NZ, and the strong and getting stronger IINet in Australia, who concentrate on service delivery.

It is beyond time for the mobile operators to go simple, and lose the content.

The market is open for the IInet of mobile: Simple pricing that changes automatically as you change usage, cheap fixed price international roaming, and all you can eat (international) data.

Holland Track and Kalgoorlie22

Given the strength of the sidewalls – what better option than to fill the tire full of foamy stuff, ignore the fact that most of it came out of the now wrecked tube and ride home?

It made it – this is the tire after I got home.
What the photo doesn’t portray is the hot and runny tire smell. I was glad for the cooling effects of the rain on the tire though.

All in all an excellent long weekend, and lots of things to ponder and prepare for when I embark on a rather longer trip in a week or three.

Thanks Adam!