With so many competitors vying for the business of telecommunications customers, carriers are finding that keeping old customers is sometimes harder than finding new ones.
Athene Software Inc., a two-year-old company based in Boulder, Colo., specializes in providing its clients with the data and knowledge to help reduce and prevent churn-a rampant problem for service providers in the telecommunications industry.
Eric A. Johnson, Athene’s president and chief executive officer, said the company uses advanced machine learning tools such as neural networks and statistical techniques to both predict subscriber behavior and recommend subscriber-specific retention strategies, resulting in more profits and a “narrowing in the equation.”
“What good is a relationship and retention if it’s not profitable?” he asked.
Johnson founded Athene in August of 1997. He formerly was president and CEO of Coral Systems Inc. where, under his direction, the company developed the widely used FraudBuster software program now sold by Lightbridge Inc.
FraudBuster helps providers prevent and control cellular phone subscription fraud. Johnson said he left Coral to start his own company when he began to feel pigeon-holed in the fraud-prevention market.
Athene-named after the Greek goddess of wisdom-employs about 35 people. The company serves the wireless, competitive local exchange carrier, Internet, long-distance and wireline markets.
Johnson said the company currently has two major clients-one from the United States and one in Europe-and is adding several more in the next few months. The small client base is a result of Athene’s alternative approach to serving its clients’ needs.
“Instead of blanket marketing people, we went after specific people or worked with people who came to us. We really dig into carriers and understand their technology,” said Johnson.
The result has been Athene’s Advanced Predictive Technology Churn software. APT Churn creates data mining models from a variety of sources, including usage, network performance and competitive pressures.
With these models, APT Churn constantly monitors wireless subscribers for potential churn, but unlike many other churn-prevention programs that only tell a provider a subscriber is about to leave, the software promises to give solutions as to how the company can keep customers, which customers are worth keeping and methods of preventing further churn.
“A lot of people feel that detection is it … but we’ve found that detection is only a small part of the whole problem,” said Johnson.
Athene’s neural network technology is an advanced form of statistics patterned after the human brain, said Johnson. This technology is being applied to several other software programs, including APT Profitability, which aids in predicting subscriber profitability, and APT Credit, which predicts which defaulting subscribers are likely to pay and what collection tactics will be most successful.
APT Churn is available now, and APT Profitability should be available by year-end.
In addition to the releases of its various APT Platform software solutions, Johnson said Athene’s future plans include adding to the platform a new, yet-to-be revealed process that will take the company through the next couple of years.
