Transforming Telecom: Boosting Customer Engagement and Loyalty to Outshine Competitors

Telecom struggles to stay resilient in today’s tough times like every other sector. Increased competition, evolving regulations, and the constant pressure of cost reduction have made it challenging to respond to emerging customer needs. But data can be the solution to all these problems. Learn how big data can empower telecom companies to grow engagement and loyalty and rise above their commodity competitors.

Telecom Companies are Struggling to Differentiate Their Services from Each Other

Companies in the telecom industry haven’t had it easy. As 5G and other digital technologies become mainstream, offering a standard set of services can no longer keep their sails flying. Most telecom companies are struggling to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Endless data growth, ever-evolving customer needs, and the demand for 24/7 service uptime make it difficult to sustain business operations – let alone drive differentiation. Organizations must offer something their competition isn’t if they want to stand out. And this must go beyond offering cutting-edge products.

Instead of focusing all their energy on introducing new product features, telecom companies must expand their creative thinking across the customer lifecycle from when a customer is onboarded to after-sales service. They must curate strategies to improve customers’ telecom experience and develop and position offerings in novel ways.

Customer Engagement Plays a Key Role in Driving Preference and Loyalty

Hiccups like price increases, M&A deals, and constant government intervention have made the business landscape extremely uneven. To successfully operate in a volatile environment, telcos must rethink their status quo. They must refresh their business models and operational strategies and expand the scope of their digital transformation initiatives.

They must also relentlessly focus on customer experience and constantly uncover new ways to drive engagement.

As Amazon and Netflix redefine customer expectations, ensuring high engagement via personalization can go a long way in driving preference and loyalty. Here’s an example:

A major mobile network operator was looking to improve the overall customer experience. Using big data, the operator could create a single source of truth and feed 360-degree customer data to a Personalized Recommendation Engine. The engine helped identify the right products for customers based on usage patterns and preferences. It also helped the operator scale the business as data volumes grew and ensured customer needs were seamlessly and continuously met.

Embracing data analytics can help telecom companies forecast customer needs instead of simply reacting to them. It can help formulate the right design principles and curate products and services that are truly customer-centric. Being proactive also allows telcos to be prepared for what’s coming and transform processes across every aspect of customer experience and delivery.

While telecom operators already collect many forms of data, much of it is underutilized or fragmented. Even those who do only use it to drive sales. Very little attention is paid to holistic CX improvement.

Using Data Analytics for a Better Customer Experience – Best Practices

To enable stunning and differentiated customer experiences, you must invest in analytics. Data analytics enables a single source of truth for customer data usage patterns. It underpins the transformation you want to achieve by enabling a new level of data-led insights.

Data analytics can allow you to anticipate potential problems and intervene to prevent them. Analytics can also enable you to offer experiences that make customers feel well cared for, increasing loyalty and retention in the long run. Engaging with a Managed Services Partner can pay rich dividends if you want to make the most of data analytics to deliver a better customer experience.

A qualified partner can help develop a robust big data implementation roadmap and also embrace big data best practices, including:

1. Designing a Layered Architecture

   The first step in transforming telecom data into action is designing a layered big data architecture. Categorizing the architecture into common layers such as collection, integration, storage, analytics, visualization, security, and data governance helps streamline the complex process of big data analytics. Such segregation, where each layer has a unique function, can help you handle the scale and complexity of big telecom data.

2. Embracing Cloud Technologies

   Cloud technologies can further amplify big data outcomes when it comes to leveraging analytics to improve telecom customer experience. Cloud ensures all organization data is accessible from a single place and offers a holistic view of operations, challenges, and opportunities. Such access helps make data-driven customer experience decisions while ensuring every dataset is constantly updated, secured, and backed up.

3. Streamlining Data Extraction

   Telecom companies generate data from various sources and in various formats. Therefore, it is important to extract this data effectively. The right approach to data extraction can ensure data from the web, log files, social media, PDFs, etc., is efficiently collected and retrieved. It can help consolidate, process, and refine it, no matter how poorly organized or unstructured this data is, and make it easily accessible to decision-makers.

4. Enabling Data Parsing Using NLP and ML Techniques

   If you want to make unstructured telecom data usable in a quick manner, you must enable data parsing using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques. These technologies help automatically transform raw and unstructured data into a format that is easy to understand and use. They also help improve the data quality, making data analytics more effective.

In a Nutshell

Driving preference and loyalty in the telecom sector is no cakewalk. To enable high levels of customer engagement, you must offer intuitive, modern, and personalized interactions. Big data delivers several capabilities, allowing telecom companies to respond appropriately and quickly to evolving market and customer pressures.

Learn how experts at Ellicium can help you collect, process, and use real-time data to boost customer experience and outdo competition – without losing focus on business objectives.