SaskTel was the Sasquatch of Saskatchewan. For years, the communications giant dominated the province's long distance and local phone markets. But competitors started to muscle in on its Regina-based territory like the Montana bears that cross over from adjacent Glacier National Park. So the company had to rethink its business strategy and direct marketing mix and, clear through 2009, is continuing to adapt to the rugged, changing communications environment in Western Canada.
A leader in the wireless and high-speed Internet markets among Saskatchewan's million inhabitants, SaskTel is a fast-moving underdog in the broadcast competition. A few years ago, the century-old company began supplying Saskatchewanians with television over the Internet and, more recent still, speeding up communications with its customers after buying improved database management technology from Cary, N.C.-based software company SAS.
Mike Woolley, SaskTel's manager of marketing intelligence, talks about the journey.
Target Marketing: How is SaskTel employing direct marketing to reach out to its customers?
Mike Woolley: We do pretty much all channels. We have our own call center. We do in the neighborhood of 18,000 to 20,000 calls a month on. We contract out to a third-party call center that's based in Saskatchewan, and they're taking on about that same volume, maybe a little bit more. ... Then we have our e-mail channel. ... One of the companies that's part of the SaskTel holding corporation has an e-mail engine, so we're using them to broadcast out e-mails to customers. And, of course, we're doing the direct mail.
TM: How have the touchpoints in SaskTel's direct marketing strategy changed in the past five years?
MW: It's ramped up a little bit more. We certainly didn't use e-mail as often as we [do now]. ... But we certainly use as much of the call center, outbound calling, and as much direct mail as we used to. The numbers are bigger, but mostly just because of the one new channel.
TM: For a company with a customer base of 425,000 businesses and residents, 12,000 customer contacts a day sounds like a lot. Why so many?
MW: When we refer to a contact, it can be anything. So we also do a significant amount of market research, to talk to customers. ... We do an awful lot of communication to customers after they've had an install or an order to find out how it went, what they liked, what they didn't like. Sometimes that's a phone call by a third-party company. Other times it's an e-mail that asks people to go to a Web [site] to fill out a survey. ... We also manage our credit services for customers who are past due. ... At least once a year, or a couple times a year, we will send out an e-mail to our entire [nearly 200,000] base of customers who have high-speed [Internet] or broadband access with us. And that's more of a heads-up to people about some of the scams that are out there, some of the phishing scams and e-mail scams out there, just a reminder.
TM: How is SaskTel CRM strategy evolving?
MW: One of the things that we as a company have really decided to work on this year is a real focus on the customer experience itself. ... We believe that a person's entire customer experience is huge in determining their degree of loyalty and how long they will stay with us; how many other services and such they will take.
TM: What approach is SaskTel taking to analytics?
MW: That's going to be something that we're going to focus on a whole bunch more in the near future. And that's specifically on retention, or doing some predictive modeling, predicting churn—particularly in our wireless market.
TM: How is the depressed economy affecting SaskTel's direct marketing efforts?
MW: It's not impacting the volume of direct marketing we're going to do. But I think it's going to change the direction. In the wireless market, I think we are seeing a bit of a slowdown in the number of acquisitions. I think that's an industry-wide phenomenon. So because of that, I think we're going to see ourselves shifting a little bit more towards some retention activities as opposed to pure acquisition.
TM: Why is SaskTel choosing to maintain its direct marketing budget at the same level?
MW: It's because things are so competitive; we have no choice.
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