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Marketing in Real Time: Beeline Kazakhstan Deploys Eastwind’s Platform

16 november 2017

EW Event Processing logs online subscriber events and helps the operator to respond immediately, by sending promos of services a specific user needs at a specific moment.


Timely Advertising as Competitive Advantage

The oversaturated telecom market forces the operators to keep rolling out new value-added services. The purpose of any VAS is to make mobile communications more comfortable, to enable brighter customer experience and higher ARPU. But to make sure an offer is not lost in the ever louder advertising noise, the operator needs to choose the right delivery time as well as the right content. A promo message that arrives at the wrong time will remain unnoticed by a subscriber at best, and irritate at worst. Real-time marketing tools prove to be an effective solution to this telecoms problem. Online-based IT products can send relevant ads to subscribers at the right time and elicit prompt response to offers.

Real-time Marketing at Beeline Kazakhstan

In February 2017, Kar-Tel company, operating in Kazakhstan under TM Beeline (Veon Group), launched a tender to find a supplier of a real-time marketing platform. The operator intended to increase VAS usage by its subscribers. That business goal required a tool to quickly roll out various offers, and test them to leave in the most effective ones. To increase the response, Kar-Tel planned to run targeted promo campaigns based on the users’ online activities. Eastwind won the contest of IT solutions with its Event Processing product.

“Ensuring a fast launch of the platform was critical, as well as ensuring the ability to quickly change scenarios after a post-analysis,” says Kamaldin Pirimbayev, representative of TM Beeline Kazakhstan (Veon Group). “The system must be so flexible and friendly as to enable an average normal business user to create small-scale scenarios, and enable a developer to create significantly more complex projects. Eastwind was able to meet all our requirements. The pre-project analysis and further implementation were rapid. Technical problems were few, and those were promptly resolved by vendor's specialists. It felt like the supplier had a solid expertise in this area.”

How Eastwind’s Solution Works

The trigger platform EW Event Processing integrates with the operator’s internal systems to monitor the network activity of subscribers, and submit the collected data to the database. In a second, the system can process up to 20,000 various event records such as reaching a threshold balance, using a certain volume of web traffic, moving to a particular cell, activating or deactivating new services, and much more. The platform analyzes the data in real time and matches it against the pre-defined scenarios. Each matching event activates a trigger to send a certain offer to the subscriber.

The system supports unlimited number of triggers: the operator can create as many cases as it needs. Here are just a few examples:

·         Yandex.Music. If a subscriber is an active user of mobile Internet, the operator offers to activate a musical service.

·         Roaming Services. If a subscriber roams into a guest network, the operator offers a package of roaming calls or messages at an attractive price.

·         Price Optimization. If a subscriber exceeds a certain threshold of voice / Internet traffic, the operator offers a more expensive price plan.

Importantly, EW Event Processing allows a user to quickly adjust or freeze irrelevant scenarios. Knowing well how volatile the mobile market is, Kar-Tel highly appreciated this feature of the system, as well as the readiness of Eastwind’s developers to pay close attention to the operator's needs. Beeline Kazakhstan ran the first cases on the trigger platform in June this year.

Effectiveness and Transport Integration

It is possible to evaluate the trigger platform effectiveness by response using specific channels. For example, an advertising USSD message with an interactive menu allows a subscriber to immediately activate the advertised service. EW Event Processing registers this fact and reports on the number of responses in the course of the campaign. DSTK or IVR channels have the same feature, unlike conventional SMS.

That is why the project uses Eastwind Navigator transport system for accurate analysis of commercial results. The solution is compiled to integrate with the trigger platform, allowing users to select the most suitable delivery channels. The combination of two Eastwind products is able to relieve the load on the operator's own transport systems. Apart from accurate statistics, the use of interactive advertising increases the likelihood of response: a subscriber does not even need to close a message to activate a new service.

In this way, Beeline Kazakhstan used the trigger platform and EW Navigator to create the Trust Payment scenario: if a subscriber's call or Internet connection terminates due to low balance, the operator offers an automatic micro loan with a commission. The subscriber can activate the service directly from the message menu.

Benefits of EW Event Processing

EW Event Processing is a multiplatform solution using two operating systems–Windows and Linux, which provides a high system performance. A high processing speed is what makes the difference for a real-time tool: the faster a subscriber receives an event-targeted offer, the higher the probability of the service being activated.

"We use our own approach to software engineering: instead of MSQL or Oracle, we base the product architecture on open-source solutions such as PostgreSQL and Redis DB,” says Dmitry Kuznetsov, head of mobile advertising group at Eastwind. “This allows our platform to compare favorably with the price of competitors, while the system performance only benefits from the software variability. In Beeline Kazakhstan, for example, we were able to quickly transfer subscriber profile data from the MS SQL database to the no-SQL Redis DB, chosen because it had showed a high processing speed. In general, any trigger platform depends on operation of external services that may not cope with online load levels. That is why the flexibility of architecture is so important."

Another advantage of Eastwind’s solution: the system uses a GUI to set triggers. This feature allows a user to master the system even if they are far from being programmers. All it takes to create or edit a business case in EW Event Processing is understanding the logic of events and being able to work with block diagrams. As early as the implementation stage, Beeline Kazakhstan's specialists were able to independently create working triggers after a week's training.

Implementation Results

At the moment, about 10 promotional scenarios are operating in Beeline Kazakhstan. The operator says business customers are positive about the results of their recent campaigns. Response to offers is now 30-50% for the USSD channel.
In short term, the operator plans to add data sources for online events, integrate with its own new analytical storage and launch interactive campaigns to grant bonuses.
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