Power of Data: Tibco & Reliance Telecom

From an Esquire article on Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive:

Here is what Tibco did for Reliance, one of the largest telecommunications companies in India: Reliance was adding something like three million wireless customers a month, but it was also losing about a million and a half, Ranadivé says. It hired Tibco to fix things. Tibco found that if a customer experienced six dropped calls in a twenty-four-hour period, he almost always switched providers. Reliance started monitoring every dropped call, and any time a customer got to five dropped calls in a day, he would receive a text message offering him free SMS messages if he topped up his prepaid card — if he resubscribed, essentially.

“Problem solved,” Ranadivé says. “I don’t need to be a psychologist and know why they’re switching after six calls and not ten or two calls. Math is trumping science.”