Amena

Amena relies on Informatica data integration platform to implement new CRM system and maintain competitive advantage

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“I don't know of another company in the world that adopted a whole new CRM system while remaining fully operational. In this sense, the Avanza project is a pioneer.”

— Bernardo Gallego, Avanza Project Manager, Amena

Fast Facts

Customer
Amena is Spain's second largest mobile telecommunications company

Informatica Solution
Informatica PowerCenter®

Benefits

• Minimized risk of implementing new CRM system
• Reduced time to results
• Improved customer service with holistic, 360-degree view of customer data

Nuts and Bolts

• Data Integration: Informatica
• Source: Oracle
• Target: Siebel
• Platform: IBM

Part of the Auna Group, Amena is a mobile telephone operator that serves 9 million customers in Spain.

The Challenge

Since its inception in 1999, Amena has experienced explosive growth. In 2001 the company nearly quadrupled its customer base, going from 1.2 million to more than 4 million in one year alone. Today the company serves more than 9 million customers and has become one of Spain's leading telecommunications firms.

While this young company realized that a track record of growth was important, Amena also knew that its future success depended on its ability to deliver outstanding service to its existing customers. To maintain its competitive advantage, Amena needed to focus on its customers—improving customer retention, increasing cross- and up-sell opportunities, and attracting new customers.

However, Amena's exisiting infrastructure was not up to the challenge. Amena used disparate systems to execute different procedures like billing, pre-payment, and post-payment. The company's basic customer relationship management (CRM) system was oriented around the company's service lines and not around its customers. The "client data master" on which its CRM tool was based was primarily the billing system; the pre-payment and fee systems managed offers, services, and payments. These source systems performed a task for which they were not designed: to provide client information to other systems.

Amena's customer service representatives lacked a holistic view of customer data. Without current, detailed customer data, representatives were unable to answer questions accurately, provide timely service or extend cross- or up-sell offers.

Amena decided to implement a sophisticated, analytical-based CRM system with a 100-percent customer-oriented architecture. Known as the Avanza project, this new CRM system had to become the client data master and, as automatically as possible, enable commerical actions such as those needed to generate real-time offers, centralize call, etc. However, for this fast-growing company, it was imperative that the existing CRM system remain fully operational while the new system was being installed. Making sure all the systems were compatible and allowing them coexist posed a huge challenge.

The Solution

Amena turned to Informatica PowerCenter to meet these challenges. The company relied on the Informatica data integration platform to synchronize, process, and transter a terabyte of data from the existing CRM system to the new one, thus ensuring an impact-free transition on the customer service departments' daily operations.

PowerCenter extracts, transforms, and loads the data from the original systems to an intermediate staging area, processes the data according to Amena's complex business guidelines, debugs the data by rejecting and localizing incompatibilities, and incorporates the data into the new CRM system.

Generating a daily average of 2 to 3 million changes in customer-related data, Informatica PowerCenter is also used to synchronize data-every day-between the two systems, because the first system continues to manage some processes for a while.

In full production since April 2004, the new CRM system, synchronized with the previous system, has provided support to all customer service department functions including customer retention, loyalty, collections, fraud, credits, and campaign management. The new CRM system serves between 2,000 and 2,500 functional users.

The Results

Minimized Risk
Implementing a new CRM system, accessible by customers, that communicates appropriate customer data to systems like billing, fraud, and collections is a high-stakes undertaking. Amena, a young company in growth mode, could not afford any lapses in operations. The Informatica data integration platform enabled Amena to implement its new CRM system without impact to its customers or the daily operations of its customer service departments.

Reduced Time To Results
The Informatica data integration platform has enabled Amena to integrate all of its customer records and attain exceptional results in a very short time. For a large variety of applications that serve as the front-end for different functionalities, users now get a single window into the CRM system through which all business processes are executed. It's no longer necessary to connect to different applications to handle different customer service issues. "We are convinced that the...Informatica solution installed has been a good and timely choice to help accomplish the Avanza project," said Juan Luis Gracia de Miguel, director of IBM Business Consulting Services Spain.

Improved Customer Service
By using the Informatica data integration platform to provide a single source of accurate, consistent customer data, Amena was able to improve its customer service, increase its client retention efforts with real-time offers and calls, and reduce the volume of incoming customer service calls. This has made it possible to create separate accounts for sales and invoicing, and, in the future, a supply catalog. With a holistic view of customer data, Amena has a full understanding of its customers' billing accounts. For example, Amena now knows when one customer is related to another. Whereas before the company recorded only service lines, Amena now keeps track of its customers.