Customer churn is a serious challenge for telecommunications companies. Double digit rates of defection are common, with many of those leaving being the highest-value customers who may use handsets for gaming, streaming or heavy business use.
If telecommunications companies are to retain more of their customers – especially the heavy data-consumers for whom quality of service is essential – it is clear that a much more focused and personalised level of service is required. That means being able to take the initiative and produce solutions before exasperation or frustration sets in.
However, traditionally, the effort to improve customer experience in the UK has focused on traditional “CRM” approaches, such as improving call centre operations. This was a question of improving how they operate and using the data they generate to gauge satisfaction and identify customer pain-points, says Mark Perrett, senior industry consultant at Teradata.
Increasingly however, telcos in the US and Asia are attaining significant gains in churn reduction by marrying together the data from their operational and business systems stacks to produce dramatically new levels of insight into what customers experience. By making the right technology choices, they are bridging the gap between two sets of data that have historically been created, stored and used separately.
This separation left telcos in a state of comparative ignorance, because network performance did not include any consideration of individual customer impact. Similarly, customer service did not include an awareness of overall quality of network service experienced by the customer. So, for example, a vital business call interrupted three times by random dropping of the call or constant buffering of a data stream would not be visible to those responsible for customer experience.
If an overall network performance metric of 99.5% success for calls was set, this might seem at a gross level to be an excellent level of service. However, if only 0.5 per cent of calls at a tower failed, the company would not know who was affected and although regarding such a service drop-out as undesirable, might not make rectification a priority.
If this cell tower was a critical component in providing service on a commuter route for high value customers, then such an oversight could have a disproportionate impact on those customers the operator was most anxious to keep happy.
However, now, by overlaying operational and business system data, they can see when that small number of failed calls comprises a high proportion of highly-valuable customers.
This throws an entirely new light on the company’s performance and enables telecommunications operators to make every effort to hang on to big-spending customers.
Time for change
In the UK too, telecommunications operators are now understanding how this advanced integration of data can yield enormous advantages in customer service.
From the business operations side, the data sources available about customers now include handset details, how they have used websites or retail stores, their interactions with call centres and their full calling history, via the Call Data Record (CDR).
To gain a complete picture of the Customer Experience, this has to be overlaid on top of the network operations data, which previously made integration very challenging when there are billions of transactions per day.
However, this integration is now readily achievable at scale, using advanced data integration and analytical approaches. By using data that segments customers according to their value and usage patterns and overlaying it on to the network operations data, a remarkable new level of customer understanding is achieved. It quickly becomes apparent where the operator needs to take action to head off likely defection or simply provide an overall better customer experience, which in a commoditised market may represent one of the few ways to differentiate between network providers.
The result is a far more sophisticated and effective customer-experience management toolkit than could ever be achieved when business and network data are kept separate.
For example, if a tower’s maintenance requires it to be out of action for a period, high-value customers using it frequently can be identified, contacted in advance, warned and offered apologies and some form of compensation, perhaps a £5 ($6.70) voucher.
This is an intervention technique that is already proving successful for telcos in the US and Asia. In another example, a customer can be contacted directly by the operator to say it has noticed that 50% of his calls have dropped off and having worked to understand why, the company suggests it may be because the software on his handset requires an upgrade. The telco could then offer a preferential upgrade rate.
The author of this blog is Mark Perrett, senior industry consultant at Teradata.
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