Connecting the digital experience dots: It’s all about ‘ME’
By : Mario Nolla
Senior VP- Analytics and Consulting Practice
Digitalisation of services has driven convergence across industries leading to a very fast rise of the connected, demanding and influential consumer leading to a role reversal. Historically, telcos had full control over the services and the products that customers accessed over the network. The increasing use of over the top applications has turned the tables in favour of the customers who control what service they want, when they want it and how often they use it.
Even the most novice users today have a comfort level with their personal mobile devices and use them to execute tasks and make decisions. Mobile computing has led to a world connecting people, devices, organisations and appliances. The ubiquitous mobile phone, with the multiple digital products and services, is a part of a customer’s digital identity.
Reclaim the ownership of customer experience: Rules of engagement
The customer now expects the digital services to be relevant and satisfying making it increasingly important for telcos to provide experiences that match the customer’s needs. Let’s consider the classical flow of service delivery – the awareness moment, the evaluation moment, the consideration moment, the purchase moment and finally the consumption moment. The process which was separated by hours or even days is now fragmented and extremely compressed from hours to minutes to seconds to milliseconds.
Interestingly, the telcos are best positioned to leverage deeper consumer insights to revamp the customer experience by driving a personalised, contextual and interactive engagement with them. They can enhance the experience by ensuring that every interaction is relevant to the customer and provide well-timed engagement related to the customer’s immediate surroundings.
Flip to digital: customer-centric digital customer engagement
Listen to me, intently
There is a general understanding that “data is the new oil”. In today’s digital economy, no company has more information about their customers than mobile operators. Most mobile phone users will have their phone with them 24/7, even while sleeping when it is used as an alarm clock. This means that the telecom operator knows (within the limitations of data privacy) where the customer is at any given time, who he interacts with and what channel of communication is he using, what financial institutions and other companies are sending him SMS.
Also, in the age of social networking, customers are always expressing their opinion about everything, including what products and services they use or wish to use. These real-time conversations and consumer-generated content are rich sources of information for driving contextual communication.
The implementation of big data platforms and the usage of streaming analytics within them allows companies today to capture, process and interpret all of that information in real time. The ultimate objective is not using creating very complex models to understand the individual behavior, but also identifying relevant pieces of information and events. There will be two distinctive kinds of events – those which are relevant for building a 360° view of the customer, and those that are relevant to understand the context of an interaction, the ever famous “moment of truth”.
Know me, holistically
Digital customers are used to being “listened to” and have now become demanding. They expect a consistent omni-channel experience from telcos, tailor-made products, personalized treatment and real time responsiveness while assuming that we know them “inside out”.
To match these expectations, operators need to transform the data and events collected in the “listening” processes into intelligent insights about the customers’ behavior. This is where the advanced analytical capabilities come into play: Soft clustering for heuristic segmentation or prescriptive Next-Best-Action model are just few examples of advanced analytics, which allows telcos to use deeper consumer insights from a slew of data sources to personalise the value proposition for customers.
These advanced analytical models to properly need to fed with not only telecom usage information, but also with information generated when customers interact with telcos to understand which products they desire, which channels they prefer, payment preferences, complaints, location, etc. When telcos fully understand the customer behaviour and consumption patterns, they can dramatically improve their ways and add value.
Empower me, completely
Telcos have to ensure that their customers feel empowered. Providing customers with access to all the information on their profile and enabling them to easily configure and manage their services is the key to make them feel that they are in control. Digital customers are used to and prefer taking informed decisions. Telcos can combine the power of advanced analytics and multiple interactive channels such as USSD, App, IVR and email etc. to ensure such interactions are spontaneous, coherent and result-oriented.
Delight me, instantaneously
Another related aspect of growing consumer power is the rise in service delivery expectations shaped by the digital players. Having experienced excellent service from digital enterprises, consumers now apply these standards across all service providers and demand an instant gratification and proactive recommendations from telcos.
Real-time, integrated and closed loop solutions ensure instant fulfillment of offers by driving the interaction with downstream applications. This is fundamental not only in digital interactions, but also in the interactions with the service of sales agents in the shops or customer care channels. The wealth of information and insights have to be made available to them so they can properly manage their customer interactions, thus achieving coherence and relevance.
Digital economy battleground: The elusive silver bullet
The traditional discount-based promotion has resulted in deal-seeking behaviour in consumers for telco offerings. Telcos need to move away from the push-marketing strategies to drive customer engagement and embark upon a journey of real-time, personalised and contextual customer engagement strategy around the customers’ lifecycle as well as their lifestyle needs.
In an industry where the competitive dynamics is getting fiercer the aforementioned trends have created an opportunity for telcos to deepen and enrich customer engagement. The ability to deliver a superior customer experience is difficult to replicate and is the only way to acquire a sustainable competitive advantage for telcos.
This article was originally published in RCR Wireless News