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Starting Point

Price transparency, low barriers to switching and predatory competition – these are the main challenges energy suppliers have to overcome. The retention of new and existing customers and thus preserving the most valuable asset is a critical success factor in competition. Based thereon, the strategic objective of one of the world’s largest private electricity and gas businesses, leading in Germany, thus is: Do not lose more private customers than can be won, i.e. avoid terminations by customers.

The daily increasing competition does not only require the development of new and intelligent marketing strategies in industries such as e.g. telecommunications and financial services; campaign management is also becoming increasingly important in the online gaming sector.

Starting Situation

Regardless of the industry - the focus is always on the customer. The objective of every business is to win and retain customers and to ultimately increase their value. For many businesses, customer loyalty and winback are standard processes. Whereas other businesses may have focused on only one of the two processes, unaware potential of the other. However, even if both processes exist in one business, they are largely handled independently of one another.

Starting Situation

Campaign planning in direct marketing is very complex due to a large product variety, various distribution channels and differentiation according to customer groups.
In addition, there are the restrictions due to the company-internal contact strategy and the desire to maximize the aggregate turnover of the various campaigns.

A background report to connect to databases enables the user to login to all required systems with one single loginin the background; there is no need for the user to explicitly login to each connection upon its first access. The requirement is, of course, that the user exists in all systems with the same access data.
In addition, logins to systems which are not personalized but operate with a technical user can be performed.

If there is no such background report, a login dialog popup appearswhen a report with database reference is opened. This function enables the user to login to the respective database.If several databases are used, several dialogs will open up. One for each database.

For many businesses, cross- and up-selling are among the most important objectives in customer management.When a customer calls a business, it seems to be the perfect time for cross- or up-selling activities.

• May any incoming call therefore equally be seen as potential for cross- and up-selling?
• And may cross- and up-selling also be successful if the customer has actually called in order to complain?
• Does success depend on how long the customer had to wait in the loop?

The arcplan library is a very useful tool for coordinating the layout of reports. All objects which are extracted from a library behave equally on the reports with regard to the selection of the subsequently described properties.

The Right Offer for the Right Customer at the Perfect Time

NBA meets NBA

A successful team in the American Basketball League NBA combines four crucial characteristics:

• the ability to work in a team
• scoring
• inspiration
• passing the ball to one another

But what does that have to do with the technical concept next best activity (NBA)? This question was discussed with the participants in the course of a workshop at the Call Center Association (Call Center Verband) Spring Conference 2013. The challenges for the implementation of an NBA concept were specifically identified and ideas for solutions were developed.

Step 1: Installing and Configuring IIS

Check whether IIS7 is installed

• Go to URL: http://localhost.de/
• The result should look as follows:

The new functions READMETADATA() and PLACEMETADATA() offer a range of quite new possibilities to the arcplan designer. As shown in the arcCorporation Demo, data queries can be dynamically set up and modified via drag & drop.

The set-up of such a query is described below.

arcplan is a tool which poses few limits for the developer. Due to its structure, the developer is very flexible in designing his reports. This is a major advantage, as the reports can thus be very flexibly adjusted to the users' needs. However, it may quickly turn into a disadvantage, as well, as reports may contain many hundreds of objects with correspondingly many links. Without guidelines for the development, an application quickly becomes confusing and hard to maintain. In particular, this holds true for third parties or new team members, who often find it difficult to initially adapt to an application. Even the developer himself may lose the overview.

In case of arcplan applications, it is quite common that the relational data source from which the framework data for navigation, user administration, comments etc. are extracted are located on one server for the development, test and/or production version. This complicates the switch between these databases, as almost all metadata apart from the server connection is placed in the arcplan repository. In particular, this includes the database name, which now complicates the simple switch between various databases on the same server.