Vodafone Spain Customer Loyalty Programs Get a Boost From ILOG JRules
New JRules-based System Will Enable Online Promotions
For the First Time
MADRID – November 8, 2005 – ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext:
ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), a leading supplier of enterprise-class software components
and services, today announced that Vodafone Spain, the Spain subsidiary of
one of Europe’s leading wireless service providers has selected ILOG JRules™ a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System
(BRMS) product line, to create a new centralized promotions platform for its
10 million customers in Spain. Using ILOG JRules, Vodafone Spain expects to
enhance its customer acquisition and customer loyalty programs and boost sales
during traditionally slow periods by rapidly introducing new promotions.
In addition to allowing Vodafone to offer online promotions for the first
time, a new rules-based promotions system called NPPI (New Platform of Integrated
Promotions) will reduce the time-to-market of new promotions and will facilitate
the creation of new and innovative promotions.
In the extremely competitive mobile phone market, a service provider’s
primary concern is “churn management,” i.e. reducing the number
of customers that move to other carriers. In Spain, Vodafone relies heavily
on promotions to support both new customer growth and customer loyalty management
programs to reduce churn. These programs rely on incentives for new subscribers
as well as rewards for current customers.
Prior to deploying the new rule-based NPPI, the management of promotions at
Vodafone Spain was a cumbersome and time-consuming task since promotions were
hard-coded into different customer relationship management (CRM) and billing
systems. New promotions and changes to existing promotions required code development
to create or modify eligibility rules. Additional coding was then required
to ensure the changes were consistent across the different systems. Vodafone
Spain’s marketing staff had to rely on IT developers to implement new
promotions and changes, which resulted in long deployment cycles.
ILOG JRules will allow business policies that map to different promotions
to be centralized and managed in a single platform. The advanced business rule
management features, including the JRules repository, will give Vodafone Spain’s
marketing teams the tools to create or update promotions themselves, and group
the related business policies into easy-to-understand decision tables, as well
as monitor the response to promotions in real-time and make any necessary adjustments.
Following a short testing and debugging phase, new promotions can go into production
within days instead of weeks, allowing Vodafone to be more competitive with
its promotions. In addition, because ILOG JRules can process, in real time,
the numerous events triggering promotions, Vodafone Spain can, for the first
time, offer online promotions and notify its customers instantly of available
rewards. In addition, ILOG JRules can enable the delivery of new types of promotions,
such as contests, home-delivered gifts, or special “keys” for access
to restricted sites.
“Improving our customer loyalty and customer acquisition programs were
critical business objectives at Vodafone Spain,” said Jose Ignacio Nogués,
IT Manager, Product, Pricing and Billing, Vodafone Spain. “ILOG JRules
brings unprecedented flexibility to our promotions management by giving our
marketing experts greater control over their promotions for a faster business
response time to competitive pressures, while improving our operational efficiency
through faster time-to-market and consistency in policies and promotions across
multiple systems and channels.”
In Germany, Vodafone D2 is successfully using ILOG’s BRMS as part of
its Realtime Rating Solution for billing applications.
ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make ILOG
JRules the industry’s leading business rule software. For the third year
in a row, ILOG has been posititioned in the leader quadrant of Gartner’s
Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines and ILOG has twice been named the
BRMS market leader by IT research firm IDC. ILOG’s BRMS customers include
eBay, Freddie Mac, Sabre, Zurich American and many other leading Global 2000
companies and governments worldwide.
About ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions
faster and manage change and complexity. Over 2,500 global corporations and
more than 465 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business
rule management system (BRMS), optimization and visualization software components,
to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products
and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. The BRMS market share leader,
ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs 690 people worldwide. For more information,
please visit www.ilog.com .
ILOG is a registered trademark, and JRules is a trademark, of ILOG. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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