Grameenphone meets customer communications management challenges

Grameen Bank was founded in Bangladesh by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who created a new type of banking by granting millions of small loans to poor people without collateral.

An offshoot of the bank, Grameenphone, was later started through a partnership with Norway's Telenor communications company to provide phone services to rural areas. That new organization developed a program through which poor women in rural villages could buy cell phones with a loan from the bank, and then sell the use of them on a per-call basis. Grameenphone soon became one of Telenor's fastest growing markets and currently serves as the major telecommunications company in Bangladesh. In three years, the organization has grown from 1 million to more than 10 million customers.

With its rapid growth, Grameenphone needed a more modern customer service organization, including e-mail, local language support and on-demand customer service. The organization sought to manage its own systems without external dependencies and to achieve seamless integration with Grameenphone's billing, CRM and data warehouse systems.

The organization chose Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software (g1.com), which, Pitney Bowes reports, gives Grameenphone the ability to:

• aggregate and transform data from various sources to allow more meaningful data to be presented in the invoice;
• aggregate complex data associated with corporate summary sheets for corporate accounts;
• design and present more customer-centric invoices, with graphics, charts and local language support;
• use product names and multilevel call categorization, as well as embed product/customer/time-specific marketing messages in the invoice;
• enable its marketing department to create messages to be incorporated later in the production process;
• provide CSRs with an exact replica view of up to seven years of customer invoices within seconds;
• allow archiving features to be captured along with data on a CD, providing portability;
• e-mail customer invoices to selected customers as needed to reduce the cost of producing hard copy;
• generate customer invoices within minutes;
• generate invoices on demand, in real time;
• sort output invoices based on various configurable parameters;
• convert print streams and perform load balancing of printers to save print time; and
• enjoy end-to-end automation resulting in optimized resources and a lower cost of operation.

According to Pitney Bowes, the Group 1 solution, which was implemented between August and November 2006, has thus far resulted in the following benefits:

• 60 percent positive customer feedback on new "English" invoices,
• fast access to two years of exact replica documents,
• faster fetching of itemized details per customer,
• automated corporate summaries generated, and
• local language invoicing implementation completed within days.