A massive undertaking

Nevra Biyikli, CRM Manager at Turkcell İletişim Hizmetleri A.Ş., elaborates: “To comply with the new regulations, we needed to review 7.9 million contracts and confirm whether the customer had ticked the relevant information box, then verify that this matched the information held in our CRM system. This would eliminate the risk of marketing to customers without relevant information, helping us achieve compliance while protecting customer satisfaction.”

Turkcell already stored digital copies of customer contracts and supporting information in a centralized IBM® FileNet® Content Manager repository, containing more than 800 million customer documents.

“IBM FileNet Content Manager is the heart of our entire document flow at Turkcell,” says Biyikli. “When it comes to customer information in particular, FileNet Content Manager provides us with a centralized way of storing all the documents we are required to keep for regulatory purposes. And if we need to retrieve those same documents, we can do so quickly and easily thanks to the IBM solution.”

The company looked for a fast, accurate way to verify the data in the contracts. And with many contracts stored as low-quality photocopies, Turkcell needed a solution that could reliably extract the required information, even from poor-quality digital images.

Time was of the essence when it came to finding a solution—Turkcell had just over a year to verify its compliance with the new regulations. After evaluating a number of document capture and data extraction solutions, the company selected IBM Datacap software offered as part of the IBM Cloud Pak® for Automation solution and worked with IBM Business Partner Aksis to get its data validation project underway.

Gonca Çorman, Expert CRM Analyst at Turkcell, says: “Aksis has been our technology partner for more than a decade. They help us to maintain all of our enterprise content management platforms to the service-level agreements set by our regulators and our customer service metrics. Aksis played a key role in this project, helping us to expertly configure the Datacap solution to ensure that the data validation progressed smoothly.”

Using Datacap software, Turkcell checked the contract documents of customers whose CRM entries indicated that they had given permission to receive marketing communications. The company processed an average of 150,000 document files every day over the course of 13 months.

Biyikli comments: “We were extremely pleased with the performance of IBM Datacap’s OCR [Optical Character Recognition] engine. We were able to take advantage of a variety of techniques to ensure the best results, even when the image quality was poor. This helped to reduce manual effort and allowed us to stick to a tight schedule.”

The results showed that nearly 5.9 million contracts had the right information; the remaining 1.9 million were passed on for manual verification, allowing Turkcell to update its CRM records to match customer preferences.

In a related project, Turkcell also used the Datacap solution to meet another regulatory requirement—this time relating to data privacy. Turkcell provides a web portal that allows customers to log in and view their own contracts and other important documents. To make sure that each customer can only see their own personal set of documents, it is important to check that the correct document set is associated with each customer record in the company’s CRM system.

Turkcell decided to use the Datacap solution to confirm this. Each document set contained a photocopy of the customer’s identity card, which contains a unique identity number. By capturing these numbers and matching them against the identity number in the CRM system, it would be possible to confirm that the two records matched correctly.

Using five Datacap servers, the company processed 2.5 million sets of identity documents—each document set containing five pages and four iterations—at a rate of 125,000 per day, and successfully captured 1.7 million identity numbers in 18 months. This was a 67% success rate, which the company considers very good.

“The scanned identity cards were often extremely low-quality images, so it was a real achievement to be able to capture so much of the data automatically,” says Çorman. “Datacap’s ability to combine multiple scanning and OCR techniques on each document was a big advantage.”

Customer retention is a top priority for Turkish telecommunications companies due to increasingly tough industry competition. Turkcell realized that if it could better understand why certain customers decide to change their mobile operator, it could take more targeted action to reduce churn and strengthen loyalty—a realization that triggered yet another Datacap project.

Biyikli explains: “When a customer leaves Turkcell for another operator, we usually receive a document requesting the transfer of the customer’s mobile number to the new operator. We realized that if we could capture information from these documents, we could use it to shape future marketing strategies.

“Although it would be too late to prevent that particular customer from leaving us, we would be able to launch similar—and better—campaigns of our own to attract new customers and prevent other customers from churning.”

Çorman states: “The insights revealed by the Datacap project have helped our marketing team to come up with targeted campaigns that respond to real customer needs. The ability to reach out to customers with compelling, personalized offerings helps us win business from competitors and build brand loyalty, allowing Turkcell to stay on track for successful growth.”