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

Telco business is becoming supersaturated. Since a 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 the tough competition, maintain the current, and gain new customers? How the future of customer experience looks like? SAS research has identified relationships between brands and customers, uncovering new ways to engage with and drive loyalty from customers over the next 10 years.

Today data consumption is quickly overcoming voice consumption. Smartphone became the main tool for news aggregation and entertainment, creating unique opportunities for telecoms to take advantage of all the digital tracks users leave behind. The enormous volume of data that are collected from telco customers can be used to optimize network performance and customer experience. However, telcos need to make customers feel in control and assured that the data they entrust to a brand will be secured. Deploying trust-enabling technologies and backing that up with a privacy-first culture will help to deepen customer relationships.

Using analytics CSPs can accurately recognize clients’ needs and expectations, expand services portfolio, make smarter decisions about their complex networks and guide capacity-planning but always having in mind privacy-first culture. Concluding – create a superior customer experience.

Telco in infotainment world

Commoditization became a big problem for telco 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 tries to broaden its services to create differentiated customer experiences with immersive technologies that can help deepen and strengthen customer engagement. Telco as an industry is transitioning to technologies that allow previously ‘in-person’ interactions to be undertaken by machines which is in line with customer expectations.

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 telco 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 a 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 a 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 the right action in the right place at the right time. Analytics provide insights into internal processes, core operations and infrastructure upgrades. It allows us 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. The introduction of a faster 5G network, which guarantees stabilization and less latency will surely create new opportunities for thems. As a result of the acceleration of data transmission, the demand for additional infotainment services will grow. Multi-play vendors providing packages of different services will be in a privileged position. SAS researchers predict that in the upcoming years we will observe consolidation of telecommunication infrastructure vendors, oriented on the widening of the offer portfolio. Increasing the consumption of content from VOD and streaming portals will drive massive internet usage, while technologies such as Artificial Intelligence will enable further automation and robotization of client service, providing personalized content for a specific customer in fully autonomous way. Furthermore, the agility and extreme automation enabled by AI will be the engine of customer experience, setting customer expectations, and delivering on them. And for that to happen, analytics teams must be in the heart of every successful telco organization striving to capitalize on the analytics economy.

Read the full report The future of customer experience is … NOW.