In terms of revenue-generation, Metadata Driven Estate (MDE) offers a huge boost right across the telecommunications sector, where it untangles the complex web of datasets that is a legacy of so much merger and acquisition activity in the recent past.
Until now, telcos have often been hopelessly hampered by the multiplicity of data marts created by individual departments or for specific purposes, leading to a degree of paralysis in decision-making. It meant that before any new revenue-generation campaign was considered, organisations had to spend inordinate amounts of time wrangling and verifying data, all the while losing out to competitors.
Companies that have adopted the MDE approach, however, have been able to prune their IT estates, establishing simpler and more effective new data warehouses that deliver the single source of truth required for marketing campaigns. Gone are the wasted days of incessant data-wrangling, says Elaine Fletcher, partner at Teradata.
A revolution in customer insight
With MDE, telecommunications companies now have the crucial ability to overlay network operations data with customer data and customer contact data (e.g. website and call centre logs), providing themselves with an accurate view of which customers were effected by individual network issues, and how likely each customer is to churn as a result of their quality of service. That insight was too complex/expensive to be feasible before the MDE and which offers a major tool in reducing customer-churn.
As a result of this integration of wholly-reliable data, for example, telecommunications companies can see when high-value customers are affected by poor signal, or lose calls because of maintenance works in the network. Previously, a small proportion of failed calls in one locality might not have led to any action. Now, however, by using the metadata-driven estate, companies can see when that number includes high-value customers, some of which will bother to complain to the call centre, others who will simply churn – MDE allows a telco to pro-actively contact those customers most likely to churn who have highest value.
This way, for instance, it may become clear that a customer who habitually streams to her device when in other parts of the network, is not able to do so on her commute. It means the telecommunications company can intervene before she defects to a rival, offering apologies, compensatory rewards, handset software upgrades or other advice.
Having gained insight into this specific problem, the company can then examine whether other customers are defecting to rivals because of the similar difficulties with the same areas of the network, then optimise network investment to focus improvements where they will achieve the highest impact to value.
Indeed, assured of the quality of the data and its provenance, a company can track the customer journey across the entirety of the services it offers – from landlines to cable TV, mobile streaming, emails and so on.
Then, because it has a trimmed-back IT estate and more accurate data, the company has more capacity to conduct significant analytics on the massive volumes of data it accumulates, revealing ever more insight into the customer experience and offering greater opportunities for new initiatives.
The speed, flexibility and reliability of the MDE will transform the ability of any data-driven organisation to meet all its challenges in an era of intense competition and demanding, customers with high expectations.
Surely any technology that hugely improves business performance in such short time and at such reduced cost, really is a revolution in its own right?
The author of this blog is Elaine Fletcher, partner at Teradata.
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