Indirect Channel, British
Telecom Retail, saves time and money with .NET.
Profile
Indirect Channel, a department of British Telecom Retail,
UK, targets the sale of its products through a number of partners.
Realtime communication with these partners was increasingly
becoming critical.
Customer Situation
Indirect Channel (IC) needed to mail out bulk communication
and track responses.
It had to get up-to-date contact information
from various marketing team members, which existed in
diverse formats, and which it did not have the necessary
search mechanism to extract. Therefore it was unable
to identify suitable partners for specific campaigns
and restrict relevant communication to them. It was
also unable to generate campaign specific templates
by itself, which made it dependent on third party agencies.
Solution
A web-based 3-tier Contact Management System was developed,
which addressed all their needs. |
The CMS is seen as a very important tool in the
hands of the client, in general, and the marketing
team, in particular. This will give the business
added benefit from the initial investment. The
successful development of the application in ASP.NET
is seen as the first step towards migration of
the KMP and other existing applications to the
.NET platform. This was a pioneering development,
which has proved a big success technically and
is a huge success with our customers. 
Hugh Kettle
Project Manager
BT Exact
www.bt.com |
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With .NET, developers can concentrate on implementing
the business requirements rather than spending
time on writing low-level infrastructure code.
This has resulted in increased developer productivity
and better value to business.
Parag Karnik
Project Manager
Mahindra British Telecom
www.mahindrabt.com |
|
A central repository of internal
and external contact information was created. Integration
with KMP made it easy to identify suitable partners
for specific campaigns. Bulk mail could be sent and
tracked by both fax or e-mail, as the client wished.
The facility to create flexible and reusable HTML templates
specific to the communication, which could be enhanced
later, was also built-in. Powerful searches to generate
partner information based on specific criteria were
made possible.
Benefits
In a short span of time, IC was transformed from a
manual setup to an automated Contact Management program
that saved both time and money. |
The central depository provided a consistent data view and
enabled faster turnaround for new campaigns to take shape.
Rapid application development using Visual Studio .NET resulted
in better productivity, while offshore development of the
entire second phase saved further costs.
In the long-term, IC will also benefit greatly from the reusability
of the solution. With the .NET platform, the existing application's
features can be exposed as Web services in future. The Windows
service developed to send bulk communications is already being
reused in other projects thus saving development efforts. |
