NEW YORK-ISeg Technologies Inc., McLean, Va., expects to release commercially by mid-June a software package that allows wireless carriers to monitor in real time customer use of different services and to respond accordingly with tailored offers.
The company, which also has facilities in Germany, Israel and the United Kingdom, is beta testing its iSeg Wireless product with several wireless operators in Europe. Within the next several weeks, it expects to reach similar agreements with two American mobile carriers, said Jeffrey Phillips, vice president of marketing.
Based on a scalable Oracle platform, iSeg Wireless is installed in call centers and typically is used in a Web environment to reduce memory storage requirements on desktop computers.
“We built our product differently from other CRM (customer relationship management) platforms in that we arrive with preconfigured algorithms, which massage the data and reconfigure it,” Phillips said.
As customers use their wireless phones, the software package monitors their individual patterns and provides ongoing updates in real time. Doing so avoids the lengthy lag times that occur when this type of information is derived from consulting studies, Phillips said.
“Our package was built by marketers for marketers. Our goal is to take the data you have and gather new information through our customer query engine to make that data more valuable,” he said.
“Many programs look at historical data and make predictions. We look at real-time data and current answers. We don’t predict. We know.”
Carrier service representatives take advantage of incoming customer calls to ask if the individual would mind answering a few questions about available services he or she likes or dislikes and opinions about possible future offers. This type of query also can be conducted via the Internet or during in-person focus groups.
One European carrier now beta-testing iSeg Wireless ascertained that 60 percent of its customers leave wireless retail stores without knowing how to use their phones, Phillips said.
“Our goal is to evaluate subscribers based on their needs and wants and to help carriers group them together by those criteria rather than by age, demographics or income,” he said.
For example, a teenager and a grandmother may be similar in that they keep a phone just in case of emergencies. Knowing that about these two different people would permit their service provider to offer them a plan with a limited number of included airtime minutes and an inexpensive phone equipped with a special one-number direct dialing for roadside assistance requests.
