Reducing customer turnover, or churn, always has been a priority for wireless carriers — and with wireless number portability making carrier switching easier than ever, turnover has become an even greater concern. The churn rate has a dramatic impact on financial results. A carrier can save tens of millions of dollars by decreasing its churn rate just a fraction of a percent.

In addition to the bottom line impact, churn rates are an important reflection of customer satisfaction. High churn rates often indicate customers are not pleased with a carrier's service and coverage offerings. Low customer turnover demonstrates strong product and customer loyalty. Any increase in churn rates must be viewed as a serious warning to a company's immediate and long-term financial and competitive prospects.

The main technology challenge that carriers face is creating a mechanism for providing near real-time analysis of customer activity. By quickly pinpointing the root causes of churn, companies can adjust their practices rapidly.

While churn happens at each stage of the customer life cycle, most of the focus has been on customer contact and customer support. Carriers need to go further. They must harvest data from all possible sources and examine their subscribers across the entire delivery cycle, including billing, order processing and service availability and delivery.

Consider the issue of service availability and delivery. A customer who experiences poor coverage and a high percentage of dropped calls is likely to switch carriers. Data that is limited to customer contact and customer support leaves the provider ill-equipped to respond in a timely fashion.

Fortunately, new innovations in data collection, aggregation and cleansing give carriers the ability to analyze call detail records (CDRs) comprehensively and quickly. These emerging methods of providing comprehensive access to the valuable data contained in CDRs provide carriers with unprecedented insight into the reasons behind turnover. Marketing and engineering groups can use this information to resolve coverage and service issues before customers think of taking their business elsewhere.

For wireless carriers to achieve this "full-view" of the customer life cycle, they need to take the following steps:

• Incorporate new and existing data sets into one data mart that is scalable enough to conduct complex analysis on terabytes of data in a timely manner;
• Start a data quality and validation plan to clean data sets that are going to be used for customer analysis;
• Use customer profiling to identify customers most likely to be profitable; and
• Deploy a common business intelligence platform across the enterprise that includes marketing, IT, engineering, customer support and sales.

State-of-the-art data warehouse technology can help provide this full view of the customer life cycle that enables carriers to serve customers better and offer more attractive products and plans. The result — lower churn and greater revenues.

Foster Hinshaw is co-founder and chief technology officer and Iri Trashanski is telecom industry manager for Netezza Corp.