By: Amit Sanyal, Assistant VP & Joint Head, Consumer Value Solutions Business, Mahindra Comviva

Today communication service is characterized by an ever-growing demand for anytime, anywhere, and always on connections enabling real-time dynamic interaction between people, services, devices and machines. The unabated consumer demand for ‘more connections, more content and services are generating a rich treasure trove of information on customers. Mobile operators (MNOs) that can exploit information to personalize services based on customer’s context and can maintain an efficient operation delight customers and generate the kind of value that will positively impact their top line growth.

Analytics is central to realizing a customer-centric network. Customer experience management essentially entails an ability to identify customers and deliver a personalized experience across all touch-points. Table 1 identifies three prime expectations customers have in terms of experience, how they translate in to requirements for the commercial offer, the insights that need to be aggregated, and the CXO responsible for that area within the operator.

Best connectivity and speed

Providing the best speed is fundamental to customer experience. Common network problems include areas that suddenly experience a significant number of dropped calls, or congestion at specific cell site. Real-time network analytics can provide MNOs with the intelligence needed to rapidly identify and troubleshoot issues. The information can be leverages improve network planning or introducing pricing offers to time shift traffic to non-peak hours.

Best offers

As digital services gain in prominence, the ability to access and action specific insights to better target marketing campaigns is recommended practice. Operators can gain some quick wins by targeting those areas capable of demonstrating quick returns. This includes:

Event Triggered Marketing by Business Moments

Business moments are specific transient opportunities during which service providers can connect with customers at the right moment of need. For example a customer using 2G data may want to download a high definition video. The moment represents an upsell for the customer. For example, a Nigerian MNO improved market share by 2% by detecting the presence of previously inactive customers as soon as they latch on to the network and deliver appropriate, contextual offers to win them back.

Next Best Offers

The ability to respond to customers with next best actions in a sales or customer service can increase revenue and reduce customer churn. Next best action responses are most effective when they take into account recent customer interactions across all sales and service channels and automatically determine and enable next best actions for each customer, such as offering them a new service, an upgrade for an existing service or a service call to address a specific issue. An operator in Lanka has implemented a predictive model that personalizes individual offers for each of its customers. As a call comes in to the contact center, a real-time decisioning system prioritizes five offers and the exact same response is offered across all inbound channels (store, call centers, and online).

Location Analytics

Location can be used to track people’s movements in real-time for effective marketing and promotions. For example – O2’s Priority Moments is an exclusive location-based service that delivers money saving deals from leading brands directly to O2 customers.

Social Media Monitoring and Insights

The popularity of social media has opened several new opportunities for MNOs to fine tune customer centric approaches. For instance, the ability to track brand product perception among specific groups and respond in a timely fashion allowing MNOs to better and protect their reputation as well as fine-tune product propositions.

Best Care

The third dimension of customer experience is to use data for proactive customer care. Best care includes trouble shooting, in-life care, bill shock management and service discovery. MNOs must wrap care around the entire customer life cycle to generate value and help operators monetize their data assets.

Action plan for MNOs

MNOs that can ingest and analyze network, location and customer data in real time or near–real time have much to gain. They will be able to quickly introduce new capabilities such as location-based services, intelligent marketing campaigns, next best actions for sales and service, social media insights, network intelligence and proactive care to significantly increase revenue and reduce costs. Many MNOs are still investing in new systems and integrating and standardizing their data, processes and reporting.