We are undoubtedly witnessing a big data explosion, with the world’s population creating a huge 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. The rise of big data brings with it tremendous opportunities for Communication Service Providers (CSP), who now have access to a wealth of information about their customers’ needs, enabling them to offer a tailored, personalised experience.
With personalisation proven to enhance the customer experience, reduce churn and extract maximum customer value, it is vital the CSPs wake up to big data’s true potential, says David Peters, CEO, Emagine
The mantra of “know your customer well and deliver what your customer needs” has never been more true. With recent research from Digital Strategy Consulting suggesting that two thirds of consumers in the UK and Germany like to receive personalised communications, in order to foster better relationships with their customers, it is essential that CSPs look to adopt a personalisation strategy which is rooted in value and relevance. To achieve this, CSPs will need to gather and analyse all available big data (from the internet, social media, mobile, credit cards, transport and building infrastructure, etc.), to enable them to deliver effective communications at any given time.
Understanding your customer
The first step in creating an effective personalisation strategy using big data analytics is to build as comprehensive a picture of the customer as possible. By taking advantage of big data to provide a far more complete profile of the individual, CSPs will be able to reveal deep insights into the customer’s “Behavioural DNA” – who they are, their preferences and what they’re doing at any given moment on the mobile network, enabling businesses to design targeted marketing offers and customer interactions based on the individual customer’s context. As a result, this data can also be dynamically adapted in real-time to their needs to provide better user experiences and generate higher returns than traditional segmented campaigns.
Communicating the right marketing offer, to the right person, in real time
To help ensure they are offering maximum relevance and value to their customers, CSPs should look to analyse data in as near real-time as possible, so that they can respond to events and customer behaviour as it happens. The ability to capture event triggers as they happen on the network and easily communicate corresponding offers as they occur will be fundamental to revenue streams and churn rates.
Delivering a personalised message while the customer device is still in their hand, for example, could be the difference between an extra data bundle sale and no sale, or even an incumbent mobile service provider and a competitor.
One of the primary success criteria for big data implementations lies in achieving deep business value from the deployment of these advanced analytics and actionable insights on top of big data platforms. Yet, to ensure best practice, it is critical that they do not push the boundaries of interaction frequency, while avoiding offer fatigue and ensuring their communications are tightly aligned to both customer preferences and campaign objectives. Communications also need to be relevant, and hence not only marketing messages are driven by this data, but also relevant service messages, and customer experience messages.
Customer Value Management
Utilising big data to deploy a personalised experience is extremely effective because it allows CSPs to add value and relevance to their customer interactions, builds trust and ‘stickiness’ and reduces the likelihood that the customer will turn to a competitor.
Data is used to deliver additional value for telecoms operators when they apply CVM or Customer Value Management, which is the practice of maximising the value of each individual customer, by making marketing offers and customer interactions that are dynamically adapted to provide better user experiences and generate higher returns.
Through adopting this approach to understand the needs of the consumer and provide the tailored and personalised experiences they demand, CSPs will be able to unlock the real value of big data and provide an individualised service that benefits both the operator and the consumer.
The author of this blog is David Peters, CEO, Emagine
