The rush for new revenue remains a key concern for service providers globally. The competitive pressures they face from declining margins and increased competition from new and traditional players are well documented. These operators continue to contemplate their own individual strategic responses to this tricky trading environment. Most are uniting behind the need to provide a broader range of digital services to their customers – targeted services that maximise the vast swathes of customer data they possess.

The alternative is for operators to shrug their shoulders at the ongoing commoditisation of data services and become increasingly irrelevant to their customers. This clearly isn’t an option and the global operator community knows it, says Martin Morgan, VP Marketing, Openet.

In August 2015, the TeleManagement Forum (TMF) published the results of an operator survey focused on customer experience management (CEM). The 52 operator respondents revealed that they are openly committed to CEM best-practice and view it as an essential component of their current and future success. The trouble is that service providers will only be able to reap the benefits of having an ‘all singing, all dancing’ CEM system if they have the customer data they need to drive it. It’s a bit like buying a sports car and not putting petrol in it.

The objective is to capture customers behaviour and insights in real-time. They key to digital service monetisation is maximising opportunism and feeding impulsive customers with relevant offers when they’re most likely to accept them. This means understanding what customers do, when they do it and where they are. Service providers need this real-time usage and experience data from all customer touch points – from the network to the call centres. This data then needs to be augmented with historical data (e.g. NPS, lifetime value score, churn propensity score, etc.) to guarantee the required relevance and maximise uptake potential.

Getting this holistic customer view is not just about having a central repository of all customer subscription and usage data. It also includes understanding customer context. Many CSPs struggle with having a holistic view because of the legacy systems that traditionally leave data silos. This disjointed approach to data does not provide the full customer view. The result is that CSPs are missing out on the associated value that integrated contextual data delivered in a timely fashion can provide.

Providing a ‘joined up’ approach, big data can enable the holistic customer view that is needed to deliver a differentiated customer experience. Operators must ensure this data is ‘right-sized’ to ensure it can be turned into ‘smart data,’ not left alone to stagnate. Capturing this smart data is forcing operators to look at their big data preparation and how they collect prepare and manage data from many different sources. Success will stem from their ability to realise the value of new business intelligence use cases on-demand, at scale and in real-time.

The next stage is to make it available to a wide range of systems – ranging from data management systems to operational systems. Big data preparation can manage the massive volume and increased velocity of data that digital transformation is driving. This will provide the data foundation for smarter CEM.

The author of this blog is Martin Morgan, VP Marketing, Openet.

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