Telco Challenge II: Instant Responsiveness to Customer Needs
Author: Dr. Roger Kermode
As more of the conventional services move to Over the Top (OTT) or IP-based delivery, operators need to know in greater detail about the sort of traffic or applications their subscribers use.
Big data technology extracts this information from the network and correlates it with more static information about the profile of the individual subscriber gleaned from interactions across multiple channels including customer call centres, retail stores and social media.
Operators need to know in greater detail about the sort of traffic or applications their subscribers use.
With full insight about the experience and the usage habits, providers can decide, per individual subscriber, what the best course of action is to give a customer what they need.
The customer service representatives can choose — depending on the profile of the subscriber — to upsell, or to instantaneously resolve a situation by execution of a network policy, or even escalate the issue to the Network Operation Center (NOC) to handle as a high priority.
Factors such as what the customer has recently posted on social media, how alike they are to other customers who have churned to take their business elsewhere and even the stress levels present in theirs and a customer call centre operator’s voices — to whom they are making a complaint — can all be taken in to consideration. This helps the customers get their problems resolved sooner with greater understanding by the telco, which also benefits from lower services costs and greater customer loyalty.
Another example of where this information can be used is in segmentation, whereby customers are aggregated into a small number of segments with other customers who share similar characteristics.