All the talk is about delighting customers but how can communications service providers (CSPs)
do that if they don’t understand and communicate with their customers on a personal level, asks
Barry Marron.
Go to any telecoms conference or read any telecoms publication and it won’t be long before you come across the words customer and experience. CSPs and vendors alike talk of delivering a better and consistent customer experience and delighting the customer. But how can you deliver a better experience if you don’t understand and communicate on a personal level with your customers? When it comes to engaging with customers check out how Google, Facebook, Apple and Netflix go about this. They send lots of communications – they’re personalised and mostly they’re relevant and timely. And because they’re relevant most customers don’t see them as spam – and once they’ve got this engagement started then it’s the main channel for care, sales and marketing.
Marron, is global
vice president of
marketing at Openet
CSPs could do worse that look at the level of relevance and engagement the leading OTTs and digital service providers have with their customers and take note as more competition could be coming from these companies. Already we’re seeing Google launch Project Fi – a Wi-Fi first MVNO and almost every week we see rumours in the press about Facebook and Apple becoming MVNOs. Add in the proliferation of free Wi-Fi and it’s fair to say that despite a contraction in CSP numbers, competition is more fierce than ever.
Competition for spend on digital services and even basic connectivity revenue (from OTTs, Wi-Fi first MVNOs and free Wi-Fi services) and the decrease in data ARPU are obviously not industry trends that CSPs warmly welcome. Add to the mix stories that are already starting to appear about congestion in LTE networks, which will force more network spending to keep up with demand and you’ve got a perfect storm. But CSPs can fight back. They can ask some hard questions about the next level of customer experience and how well they really know their customers and how they engage with them. In this fight CSPs have many assets that can be used to differentiate themselves from the competition.
The customer base – CSPs’ most important asset
CSPs have many assets that they can use and build upon in order to grow new revenue streams. These include monetisation systems and processes, service creation systems as well as the network. But it can be argued that the one main asset a CSP has is its customer base. One important aspect is that the CSPs have a regular payment pattern with their customers. Post-paid customers get a bill every month. Most pre-paid customers top up their balance more frequently than this. The ability to build on this regular payment process is key to ensuring that new business opportunities are monetised.
With this basic foundation CSPs can start better engaging with their customers. However, engagement needs to be relevant and to be so it must be personalised and timely.
Four key pillars of customer engagement
Relevant and personalised customer engagement needs to be built on four key pillars. These are: Visibility and Intelligence, Interaction and Personalisation, Service Development and Delivery,
and Monetisation.
Visibility and Intelligence
Business intelligence has two main components – historical intelligence and real-time intelligence. Historical intelligence is useful for building the profile of a customer. These profiles can include customer usage and spend patterns, their lifetime value, their propensity to churn score, any recent calls to customer care and others.
Then there is intelligence on what a customer is doing here and now. This is real-time data that a CSP analyses in real-time (streaming analytics). CSPs already collect customer usage data in real-time (for charging purposes), and now they are looking to carry out streaming analytics on this data. They then combine this with historical data on the customer to know what offer/communication is most relevant to a particular customer.
Interaction and Personalisation
People hate getting spammed with irrelevant emails that clog up their inbox and waste their time. Conversely people actually like getting personalised, relevant offers. According to research by Teradata and Celebrus Research in 2015, 63% of consumers across every age group like to receive personalised offers.
The ability to know when to engage with a specific customer to make a specific offer requires the use of a combination of historical business intelligence and real-time streaming analytics. Looking at an example, a CSP sees that someone spends a lot of time streaming music and has a high churn propensity score, why not offer then one month free Spotify Premium (assuming the CSP has a partnership with Spotify), the next time they start listening to a streaming music service.
Service Development and Delivery
As CSPs look to increase relevance with customers through more personalised engagement they’ll need to have a much wider range of offers that reflect the needs of an increasingly segmented customer base. Customers are demanding more services and in faster time. CSPs want to offer more value-based offers, tailored to suit various customer needs and capture maximum revenue from different segments. This
means an increasing amount of offers that often need to be defined and launched in shorter timescales. In order to do this CSPs are increasingly looking towards a centralised offer catalogue.
By bringing customers more relevant choices with context-sensitive offers sent directly to their devices in real-time, CSPs can substantially increase sales conversion rates and avoid the risk of confusing customers with too many offers and options.
Monetisation
As CSPs develop more offers for an increasingly segmented customer base the ability to be able to quickly apply pricing and charging rules to a wide range of new offers is fundamental. There have been many well documented cases of CSPs giving services away for free dressed up as marketing offers, while the reason for this generosity was that the billing system couldn’t charge for this new service. CSPs
cannot be restrained by failures in billing systems when rolling out new products, services and offers.
CSPs have an opportunity to develop deeper relationships with their customers by taking customer experience to the next level to deliver smarter engagement and increase the relevance of the operator to the customer. This can drive trust, loyalty, upsell opportunities and profitability. In order to do this CSPs need to provide engagement that is personalised, timely and relevant. If they don’t someone else will.
