Buttressing Growth

The Indian telecom industry has seen many changes and developments over the past decade. From technology to psychographic variations to market dynamics to offerings, there has been an all-round transformation.

One of the most significant transformations which the industry has seen lately is the willingness of organization to move from a product-centric approach to customer-centric culture.

In a prepaid dominated market like India, service providers have started realizing that price discounts, promotions, acquisition drives, and cheaper packages are not sufficient for ensuring loyal and profitable subscriber base. It is sacrosanct to create delightful experiences for consumers and ensure better services and value. However, with the massive rise in the number of interaction channels such as IVR, social, digital, email, call center, branch, kiosk, etc, organizations face a major barrier in leveraging the data from each channel in order to create consistent customer experiences.

Analytics plays a pivotal role in helping service providers in deriving valuable insights from this mammoth information overload and help them take decisions based on facts in order to improve efficiencies,reduce costs and drive business outcomes. Information Management and analyt-ics can help service providers in five key areas, which can in-turn drive revenue growth and optimize costs.

These key areas are:

Data Foundation for a Customer- Centric View: The classical challenge which service providers across geographies face is with identifying and integrating data from multiple disparate sources. With sound information management techniques, information about customers, products, online activity, third-party data, sales and campaign results, and contract lifecycle status, can be standardized, cleansed, deduped and integrated in order to create single view across lines of businesses, channels and subscriber base. Such high-quality data is certainly a major asset for any organization and acts as a strong foundation for fact-based decisions.

Micro-segmenting the Micro-segmenting the Customers:

Traditionally, service providers have been segmenting their subscribers and customers based on geography, demography, earning patterns, etc. However, this age of intelligence give them an opportunity to micro-segment customers based on their usage patterns, bill payments, travel frequency, offer acceptance, service requests and so on. Offers can be made based on a consumer's personal preferences via his/her favorite channel and at the right time. This is a major step in eliminating intrusive marketing and commencing a pattern of relationship based personalized marketing which helps create better value and customer experience.

Managing Churn, Profitability, and Loyalty: Thanks to prepaid cards and mobile number portability, switching from one service provider to the other is longer a tedious task. This highlights that product is no longer a differentiator. Delightful experiences, superior service and deep understanding of consumer needs will play a vital role reducing churn and increasing share of wallet.

With the power of predictive analytics, the propensity of churn can be forecasted, irregularities can be flaggedoff at an early stage, offers can be gen-erated considering the seasonality of use, subscriber network analysis can be leveraged and transactional data can be used to enhance cross-sell. This creates an environment in which consumers feel that their service provider understands their needs better and provides better value; thus increasing stickiness and share of wallet.

Network Management: Network management and optimization is key to ensure both quality of service as well as scalability. Issues such as poor coverage, call drops, low data bandwidths, high seasonal demands, tower load, etc., can be efficiently addressed to with the help of analytics. Managing traffic by optimizing routing mechanisms and optimizing infrastructure utilization in the background helps improve service levels which in turn impacts customer experience, operational costs and revenue.

Real-time Decision Making: Consumers are talking everywhere and all the time - from social media platforms to emails to call center to purchase outlets. Listening to these conversations and replying with the best possible solution, in real-time is the key. Easy and approachable analytics, such as data visualization, helps users across departments to utilize these valuable nuggets of information and generate offers/solutions in real-time.

It also empowers the decision makers to give a comprehensive view of what's happening on both operational and client facing fronts and make fact-based decisions on the go. Consider, for instance,if the in-store data suggests that the subscribers coming for bill payment are inclined towards enquiring about family plans - the necessary decisions for shuffling the point-of-sale outlet can be taken quickly. This reduces the chances of a decision bottleneck and ensures better efficiency and output.

These are the five basic areas where analytics can help the telecom industry. That said, there are no limits to the creative usage of analytics in unexplored future-driven avenues. The world around us has been transforming. Within a matter of few years, we have experienced the transformation from Information Age to Interconnection Age to the current - Intelligence Age. Data is emerging as an important class and deriving meaningful insights from data is no longer a mere IT project.

It is an industry-wide strategic imperative and a boardroom agenda. At the vanguard of this analytics edge are the organizations who inculcate a culture to data-driven decision making and encourage real-time fact-based decision making across departments.

This helps organizations to keep consumers at the core of their business strategy and generate valuable offers, enhance efficiency, improve service, and create cross-channel engagement opportunities. Delightful customer experiences catalyzes in reduction of churn, increased share of wallet, raise service benchmarks, enhance brand loyalty, and attain better profits. In this way, analytics plays a pivotal role in helping service providers in transforming the cross-channel data wave into a plethora of business benefits.