Since deregulation, an incredible number of competitors - providers of telephone service as well as suppliers of Internet capabilities - vie for Italian customers' attention. Despite the fact that the Telecom Italia data warehouse has been live only for a matter of months, the company's project team has begun already to use insight generated from the system to combat the ever-increasing field of competition.

Telecom Italia's team plans to continue to gain valuable knowledge to help in the sales, customer care, marketing, special promotions and electronic-commerce areas. What is more, the company will analyse data to gain the insight necessary to increase customer retention, encourage cross-selling, curb customer attrition and build customer loyalty. Telecom's team will study customer behaviour, service types, changes in service, effectiveness of promotions and a host of other factors that impact overall customer satisfaction and value.

Trisolini does not expect results overnight. Ultimately, he feels that having actionable information will enable Telecom to measure such things as how much additional revenue specific promotions net the company, or which products and customers are more profitable than others. 'We intend to learn a lot about how to run effective discount campaigns and how to bundle products while retaining customer profitability,' explains Trisolini. He adds, 'Gaining such a competitive advantage is only possible through the use of data warehouses.'

The solution also will help Telecom Italia's team determine specifics about customer service: for example, key facts such as the number of times one customer calls for assistance on the same problem. By determining patterns, changes may be put in place to stop recurring problems.

The data warehouse contains a variety of data about Telecom Italia: products and services, possible configurations of products and services, contracts and usage of 25 million customers. This information helps Trisolini and his team segment customers according to behaviour. Analysing customer segments provides valuable actionable information about when, how, why, how much, where and how often customers interact with their products and services of choice. 'By knowing more about how customers behave, we can determine what they want,' Trisolini contends. 'Armed with insight, we can offer them the right products and services at the most appropriate point in our business relationship.' He adds, 'By providing data-mining capabilities to analysis experts and to a broader base of business users, we are enabling more people in our organization to be customer-centric.'

Constructing the warehouse took six months. Today, the Enterprise Data Warehouse collects data from four data centres; however, Telecom Italia is developing further warehouse content to support customer profiling. It is expected that the warehouse eventually will hold between five and ten terabytes of data. There may be as many as 10,000 people from Telecom Italia and its subsidiary companies who ultimately rely on the warehouse for information.

A key focus for the Telecom Italia team is now CRM. Sales and marketing teams will work to better understand details about the behaviours of the telecom customer base. The company also plans to start a CRM project with IBM Intelligent Miner for Data, a key data mining tool within the solution. 'The plan is to continually develop and refine our capabilities in customer profiling, data mining and general business intelligence,' notes Trisolini. He concludes, 'We are very focused on the benefits business intelligence technology brings us and on becoming more in tune with our customers.'