Alltel Wireless and its partner Acxiom this week gave some public insight about the state of direct marketing for service providers.

Acxiom says its customer base includes all of the major wireless carriers, but that Alltel’s implementation, which started in 2005, is the most thorough.

In the past, “We kind of had one-off efforts that were not very sophisticated, not very robust,” said Tara Llewellyn, director of Alltel’s direct marketing efforts. Acxiom’s software helped the carrier determine which customers to contact, how to contact them and when to do so, thereby contributing to 265% incremental post-paid growth in new accounts, she said.

The software is customized. “It’s not explicitly off-the-shelf… there is an element of it that was built with us in mind but it was a collaborative project,” she added.

What Acxiom supplied for other mobile phone companies was limited to customer acquisition analysis, compared to a variety of follow-up and support analysis for Alltel, said Greg Hogue, vice-president of the communications, media and travel industries for Acxiom.

Future versions of Acxiom’s software will perform analysis in near-real-time conditions, he said.