The Customer is a leading communication solutions provider in a south-central African country, offering data, fixed and wireless internet, mobile financial services, as well as voice and short message systems. Its footprint spans all local provinces and is covered by 4G (the fastest internet speed in the country), 3G, EDGE and 2G networks.

The Customer was facing a very specific challenge, characterized by communication and technical issues. The main channel used up to that point, in order to communicate with customers, SMS, had lost its effectiveness. Customers had been overwhelmed by this method, due to multiple SMS campaigns received daily, so, they had developed an aversion towards it. As a result, the Customer wanted to adopt a new way of communicating with them.

Given the much higher response rate in phone calls, the Provider wanted to conduct campaigns via outbound calls.
However, there were several main challenges to face, given the fact that resources in Africa are limited – as they are developing countries:

• the hardware investment is too complicated to happen,
• the valuable data center rack space should not exceed 1U,
• the bandwidth and connectivity are very limited, and outages are common in such operational contexts.

Exelysis tackled all challenges with a combination of solutions.

• Exelysis Broadcast Dialer. The outbound automated dialing campaigns was the easy part. Exelysis Broadcast Dialer can perform thousands of concurrent calls, with large rates of new calls per second.
• Modular IVR. Through the Modular IVR the customers can hover through prerecorded messages and experience the marketing approach.
• Additionally, the Exelysis Real-time Monitoring, gave the option of A/B Testing: at the beginning of each campaign, and for the first thousand calls, the response to different messages is tested. As soon as the most effective message is determined, based on the conversion rate, the campaign continues with it until completion.
• Exelysis Media Gateway & Contact Center Platforms. To provide the service with minimum hardware and rack space, Exelysis Lab, produces volumes reaching 1000 concurrent calls through a single 1U server. This happens, by utilizing virtualization technology and the Exelysis Media Gateway & Contact Center Platforms.

With the Solution of Exelysis, the Provider can promote the product to customers, and is now able to:

• Perform marketing campaigns through multiple channels, including a new voice channel.
• Achieve higher conversion rates comparing to their SMS campaigns.
• Get analytical data on their customers’ preferences and behavior.
• Increase customer satisfaction and maximize profits.

Additionally, the solution provided has been designed:
a) to be resilient against network connectivity issues and
b) to provide a uniform API for handling the campaign management operations in all re-mote sites where the service is deployed.