Analytics enable companies to distinguish generic offers and provide superior customer experience in telco business

Today in a smartphone driven world telecoms need to develop new business strategies and solutions that answer customer demand and support tech innovation. Analytics economy is one of the key enablers.

Telco business is becoming supersaturated. Since variety of offers is on the rise, customers become increasingly demanding. About two-thirds of the world's population is now using mobile devices. Data is exploding, networks are increasing in size and complexity, but revenue for communications service providers (CSPs) isn’t growing at the same rate. What telco can do to survive tough competition, maintain the current and gain new customers?

Today data consumption is quickly overcoming voice consumption. Smartphone became the main tool for news aggregation and entertainment, creating unique opportunity for telecoms to take advantage of all the digital tracks users leave behind. The enormous volume of data that are collected from telco consumers can be used to optimize network performance and the customer experience. Using analytics CSPs can accurately recognize clients’ needs and expectations, expand services portfolio, make smarter decisions about their complex networks and guide capacity-planning. Concluding – create superior customer experience.

Telco in infotainment world

Commoditization became a big problem for telecommunication companies. How many offer mixes can one create and how far can one go with lowering the price while still making the business profitable? Finding the Unique Selling Proposition is very difficult when everything already has been done and all telco offers seem similar. Low price no longer makes a difference. Telco try to broaden their services to improve and expand customer interactions.

“Consumption of telecom products has fundamentally changed with digitization of services, which has resulted in higher levels of customer satisfaction to take center stage.  Telcos have started to apply analytics to their huge volume of data, in order to personalize their services and products, gain customer insights and achieve improved decision making. Advanced analytics allows telcos to unlock new enterprise value, enhance customer experience at every touch point and enable them to proactively offer services and products such as video or audio streaming services or unlimited internet packages to undecided subscribers who are most likely to buy or respond,” says Alaa Youssef, Managing Director at SAS Middle East.

Applications for infotainment are on the rise and members of the mobile society want to take advantage of different digital devices, e.g. start watching their favorite series on the smartphone while coming back from work and finishing at home using the same app on the flat screen TV. The telecommunications industry is made up of different types of companies from satellite, internet, and mobile to cable TV providers offering similar packages.

If CSPs want to stand out from the business crowd and be associated with modern and innovative brand they need analytics to make better decisions about the direction of their business. In the client-centric world customer experience matters more than ever and ensuring customer loyalty is a challenge. Quality of service becomes the most important KPI (Key Performance Indicator), whether we consider network quality, customer care or quality of content.

Analytics in action

Applying analytics to huge volume of data helps telecom operators to achieve timely and accurate insights about their customers, networks and operations for improved decision making. Companies use analytics to increase sales, maximize revenue and decrease operational costs, analyze customer loyalty and satisfaction, reduce churn and fraud, improve risk management. Analytics provide an understanding of customers’ needs, behavior and journey across channels. Their preferences and trends in content consumption. These insights can then be used to improve interactions, optimize shopping paths and prepare valuable premium services. What is extremely important, these also can happen in real time, capitalizing on customer context, triggering right action in right place at the right time. Analytics provide insights into internal processes, core operations and infrastructure upgrades. It allows to estimate network demand, predict service interruptions before they happen, optimize performance and guide accurate capacity planning to maintain high service availability. Analytics offers CSP’s an opportunity to develop innovative services and new revenue streams.

What is still to come?

Telco business is constantly evolving. Introduction of faster 5G network, which is expected to guarantee unwonted stabilization and less latency will surely create new opportunities for telecommunication companies. As a result of acceleration of data transmission the demand for additional infotainment services will grow. Multi-play vendors providing packages of different services will be in privileged position. SAS experts predict that in the upcoming years we will observe consolidation of telecommunication infrastructure vendors, oriented on widening of the offer portfolio. Since mobile phones are not only for making phone calls anymore, internet data package becomes as important as minute and SMS package. Increasing consumption of content from VOD and streaming portals will drive massive internet usage. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence will enable further automatization and robotization of client service, providing personalized content for a specific customer in fully autonomous way. All those processes will need support from analytics teams. The information coming from massive infotainment environment needs to be processed and analyzed in order to create valuable offers for clients and enable building long-lasting relationship with the brand. The information coming from the network needs to be processed in real time in order to prioritize available assets and secure superior customer experience