Real Time Success for CGI and Bell Mobility

Bell Mobility has wireless phone products and services to meet all of its customers’ varied needs. However, in order for Bell Mobility to maintain its edge in an extremely competitive industry, it had to come up with a fast, reliable system capable of addressing these needs. In addition, the company was looking to boost revenues through churn reduction and increase up-sell and cross-sell opportunities (selling more profitable rate plans and features). Selected tools would be required to provide customer service with a real time recommendation engine to help enable this transformation in customer service. Also, the ability to track the acceptance or rejection of offers would be crucial to the success of this initiative. In short, the ideal solution would address the primary needs of the company (increased revenue, customer loyalty) through timely responses to the customer in a proactive and consistent manner.

When all the options were evaluated and the decision to deploy a selected tool reached, CGI was called to implement the solution.

The Challenge
The technical challenge was to find off-the-shelf tools to address the problem. Bell Mobility’s team of customer service representatives (CSR) needed to have access to reliable information about their customers during calls. The software had to not only provide recommendations to the CSR, but also had to be easily integrated into Bell Mobility’s operating environment. And it all had to happen within very tight deadlines.

CGI was brought on board as part of a multi-disciplinary team. Bell Mobility had chosen the E.piphany real time recommendation system (RTRS), and all of the project partners agreed to adopt CGI’s Project Management Framework (PMF) in conducting and implementing the solution. The new customer service interface was dubbed SIMON.

CGI faced a number of challenges in the project. It had to coordinate the teams from the various partner companies to work in unison towards a common goal. CGI members had to learn the intricacies of the E.piphany software quickly and also had to connect to dissimilar environments in order to obtain the data the software needed in real time. In addition, it was decided that the response time from the E.piphany recommendation engine to SIMON could not exceed three seconds.

The Strategy
CGI’s role in the project was to provide project management leadership and resources. It also supplied technical personnel, who developed a communications layer between Bell Mobility’s user interface and the E.piphany recommendation engine and coordinated the hardware installation, configuration and integration with Bell Mobility’s network. CGI’s system administration services team installed the operating system, browser and other client components and provided backup and disaster recovery procedures.

From the outset, weekly meetings were held among the project managers from the companies involved. Issue/action logs and project plans were diligently maintained and reviewed. Project managers monitored their respective teams consistently to ensure key activities were completed on target and critical issues were addressed promptly. Sign off on key deliverables was also required from the parties involved.

An early prototype of SIMON provided a glimpse of how the CSR screen would look and enabled early testing of the E.piphany interface. In addition, extensive volume testing and monitoring by the Technical Support team mitigated the risk of mainframe performance degradation due to extra calls to the data base management system (IBM’s DB2).

• Hardware Environment: Five machines using Intel Pentium processors, capable of running multiple CPUs, as E.piphany software can take advantage of such H/W configuration.
• Software Environment: Windows NT Server V.4 with Option Pack and SP5; SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition.
• Special Tools: E.piphany Real Time Recommendation Platform (RP) and Analytical Platform (AP); various drivers (DB2 Connect ODBC driver).

The Results
The complete package was delivered three days ahead of schedule, and Bell Mobility’s customer service representatives used the application immediately without a single malfunction. Now, as customers call Bell Mobility, CSRs receive and promote offers on their screens based on the customer’s profile and usage. RTRS also generates statistics on past offers and responses.

“CGI added value in a number of ways to the Real Time Recommendation project,” stated Michael Stanford, Bell Canada’s Group Manager - Wireless Revenue & Loyalty Management. “Their expertise in project management and knowledge of Bell Mobility's systems helped to ensure that this implementation was delivered on time and on budget. In addition, the CGI personnel on this project were willing to put in long hours, propose solutions to implementation barriers and make critical decisions in order to achieve a successful launch.”