Communications service providers (CSP) are surrounded by challenges from all directions, writes Robin Duke-Woolley, the chief executive of Beecham Research. Their central service offering has commoditised, growth is constrained by market saturation and they have no option but to invest billions in capex in the next generation of mobile technology. Against this unappealing background, they have to deliver great experiences or customers will walk.
With the COVID-19 pandemic putting connectivity even more at the centre of peoples’ lives, CSPs are under intense pressure to operate more efficiently while addressing the shift in network usage from centralised offices to more geographically distributed home-workers. This opens up a vast arena in which much can go wrong. Wrongly configured home Wi-Fi, congestion caused by the voracious bandwidth consumption of locked down children and device and software issues can all look to customers as if they’re the networks’ fault. CSPs have to turn this losing game into a winning situation but efforts so far to utilise their data to transform their operations and customer satisfaction have not delivered the results they need.
CSPs have focused on their data but data alone isn’t the answer. It’s what is done with the data and how the insights within it are acted upon that has the power to transform the telecoms industry. CSPs have invested heavily in data infrastructure but have not closed the loop by completing their data strategies to encompass analytics, automation and the decision-making capabilities needed to provide services that increase customer satisfaction.
Increased customer satisfaction is the means by which they will compete with new market entrants, retain existing customers and carve out a larger share of the digital value chain. Research from analyst firm Analysys Mason has uncovered that for every 1% increase in net promoter score (NPS) there is a corresponding decrease in churn of 4%. Similar research from AT&T has shown that customers that have a customer satisfaction score of 90% or more typically spend US$10 more each month and remain as customers for longer than those with a score of 75%. This sort of results rely on the cohesive utilisation of CSP data, as shown in Figure 1, to drive satisfaction and those that are successfully meeting customer expectations know in much greater depth the people who buy and use their products and services.
This goes beyond standard segmentation criteria such as age, gender and income and brings together insights such as: What do they do with their time? What sort of places do they like to frequent? What do they think of other brands? What do they think of your brand? Continue reading in Tech Trends magazine »
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