With millions of events and transactions taking place daily on their networks, telcos hold more data than many other businesses. What they do with that information makes the difference between thriving and failing, yet market-leading operational and business analytics tools are unable to handle the pace.
According to Ovum’s most recent Telecoms Customer Insights report, operators can expect to lose half of their existing customer base over the next 12 months, so it is vital that customer-facing telco employees make real-time data-based decisions in order to reduce customer churn, says Tom Cahill, VP EMEA, Logi Analytics.
It is easy for customers to switch providers today which is why telcos invest heavily in complex CRM systems. An individual customer may not become aware of a fault or issue until their own experience is compromised, so the operator must have visibility of every event – down to a single device. This creates an abundance of data which – in the wrong hands – is often redundant. Unless this data can be seen and interpreted by the right user, action cannot be taken and the customer remains unhappy.
In addition, telcos need to monetise their data insights and upsell services and package deals. When networks were circuit-switched, it was relatively straight forward to charge per call or based on the number of minutes used. But with networks now evolving to packet-switched and customers shifting more to data, telcos need to evolve their business models. Business intelligence can help by understanding the characteristics of data usage and a customer’s behaviour patterns with the view of creating new services and offering upsell opportunities.
Several telcos are taking a more strategic approach to the role of data in their organisations and are adopting dashboards for their BI needs. However there are still challenges that need to be overcome in order to take advantage of the opportunities available. Three areas that telcos commonly struggle with are operational performance, improving network monitoring and optimising services like bandwidth.
Storage of data is also another issue that needs to be addressed, as more often than not, different parts of the network are offered by different providers, who may store and analyse their data in different ways. The challenge lies in collating all this data into a central location and normalising the way the data is analysed in order to build an overall, concise picture.
Dashboards and reports are core to delivering information and analytics insights across a business. Better 
visualisation through interactive dashboards enables businesses to draw the entire workforce into the analytic conversation, thereby empowering users to discover new insights by delving deeper into the new data. Interactive dashboards also allow users to interact directly with the data to focus on those specific areas of interest that matter most to that individual customer and to take action where necessary.
In order to effectively implement dashboard solutions, telcos must have a thorough understanding of where their data comes from, as supported by a strong data warehouse or data repository where historical and real-time data are managed. Data must be of high quality, ensuring accuracy and validity.
Often there can be resistance to adopting new data automation systems; on the other hand however, manual processes are more prone to errors. Better dashboards can yield an immediate return-on-investment (ROI); for example where a decision can be made that will keep a customer happy, switching them to a different part of a network to solve a dodgy signal, may result in one more retained customer. Dashboards are a cost-effective and simple way for telcos to become agile because the actionable data is in the hands of the right people, not sitting with management.
While there is always a variety of analytics challenges for telcos, improvements are being made all the time. Today’s data dashboard providers empower telcos to improve their network monitoring, enhance operation performance, reduce support call times and ultimately to retain happy customers.
The author of this blog is Tom Cahill, VP EMEA, Logi Analytics.
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