Comptel at TM Forum Live! 2017: Showcasing Sponsored Data and Predictive Customer Journeys

Follow the customer, not the competitor. That’s the way it should work.

However, many operators struggle to find the right service, marketing or monetisation strategies to engage and excite their customers. Customer-centric strategy is now more important than ever, at a time when consumers demand better levels of service, attention and instant gratification from their operators across their whole customer journey. Customers are always on the journey and operators should be able to provide a personalised and consistent customer experience.

Comptel is working to help operators solve key customer challenges to improve customer experience at every touch point of their omnichannel journey, and we’ll demonstrate the fruits of our efforts at TM Forum Live! 2017 in Nice, France, 15-18, May 2017. We are proud to once again contribute to two TM Forum Catalysts, which are proof-of-concept initiatives that bring together large and small digital and communications service providers and other ecosystem players to develop innovative solutions for common industry challenges.

Both Catalysts provide strategies that help operators meet customer demands and add new revenue opportunities through improved engagement. If you’re in Nice for the event, we encourage you to stop by the Catalyst Theatre to learn about both initiatives. Here’s a preview.

New Business Models with Mobile Sponsored Data

Championed by Orange and NTT, this Catalyst also includes Datami, CloudSense and Sigma. Building on the success of our 2016 presentation, we aim to give operators the detailed blueprint they need to turn current sponsored data trials into complete market offerings.

Customers love using their mobile data for ecommerce, stream videos and play online games, but they’re afraid to engage in such activities that eat up their data plan. By allowing a third party to pay for data access, sponsored data programs remove the financial barriers that prevent mobile users from engaging. It’s a great incentive to improve customer engagement, build loyalty and drive revenue.

The Catalyst on Sponsored Data will take place at 16:30 pm on Monday, May 15 in the Catalyst Theatre.

Maximising Engagement with Predictive Customer Journeys

Championed by Orange, Ncell and ArtofArc, Comptel creates predictive customer journeys together with Salesforce, Vlocity, Huawei, Teavaro and Comarch. It’s important for operators to engage with customers at every level and channel of the buying journey, especially those customers who engage self-service shopping. Customer journeys are inherently omnichannel by nature, thus we need better insight into the real-time customers’ digital moments to find the right context to engage.

Customers crave this type of service – our recent research survey found 55 percent want more personalised engagements from their mobile carriers. Our Catalyst will provide the blueprint for operators to reach and motivate customers with those personalised, customised offers.

The Catalyst on Predictive Customer Journeys will take place at 15:00 pm on Tuesday, May 16 in the Catalyst Theatre.

We received so much positive feedback from last year’s Catalysts, and our Sponsored Data partnership was even recognized by TM Forum as the “Most Innovative Catalyst – Commercial Applications in Communications Industry” in its 2016 Catalyst Awards. We hope to make a similarly big impact this year, and look forward to sharing our ideas with guests in Nice.

Visit TM Forum’s Catalyst Theatre to see these demonstrations in action. To arrange a meeting with Comptel at TM Forum Live! 2017, email [email protected]

Download a copy of the Comptel research report “The Power of Personal” to learn more about changing consumer attitudes toward personalised services.

Comptel and Salesforce Empower Digital Omnichannel Experience with Next Best Engagement Solution

In today’s omnichannel world, the digital customer journey often begins online or on a mobile device, but is later completed in person, over the phone, or through a different digital channel. In fact, even though most customers start their journey online, 69 percent of customers turn to retail stores to complete their purchase.

Telcos have a vast amount of customer data at their fingertips, and yet most digital communication service providers still lack the ability to connect the dots throughout the digital customer journey. To solve this issue, Comptel introduced the Next Best Engagement solution with Salesforce, which will empower the omnichannel customer journey for digital telcos, during this year’s Mobile World Congress.

The Next Best Engagement solution is powered by Comptel’s Fastermind, which recommends, predicts and automates real-time decisions for the most suitable actions in a customer’s journey. By combining Fastermind’s applications for digital telcos and the Salesforce Marketing, Sales, Service and Community clouds’ capabilities, the Next Best Engagement solution allows operators to recommend and trigger actions that enable more personalised marketing and sales opportunities and more responsive customer care.

Filling the Gaps in the Digital Customer Journey

There are many major chasms in the digital customer experience that Next Best Engagement can help address. For example, mobile providers struggle to identify customers who are both an individual retail customer, as well as a customer on a business plan through their employer. Similarly, they are also unable to recognise when a customer begins the customer journey online and later calls or enters a brick-and-mortar store to continue that same process.

These are major shortcomings for telco service providers, as Generation Cloud customers – whether B2B or B2C – expect personalised, contextual, and seamless experiences across all touchpoints. For example, if a customer walks into a retail store, it’s important for the service provider to know where that individual left off in the journey so that they can offer them a personalised experience and entice them to complete their path to purchase.

Next Best Engagement helps improve interactions at each stage in the customer journey, as operators reach customers through multiple sales transactions, product interactions and service engagements. Utilising data from each of these interactions, the solution can provide the real-time intelligence operators need to maximise each touchpoint, fostering long-term loyalty through personalised service.

Proactive, Personalised, Contextual Recommendations

As Comptel’s Power of Personal research found, 55 percent of mobile customers are interested in receiving personalised, proactive service offerings from their mobile provider. However, operators are missing a huge opportunity here, as only 13 percent of customers are actually receiving these offers.  Next Best Engagement with Comptel’s Fastermind and Salesforce’s leading customer engagement platforms is able to predict, recommend and automatically trigger full-blown personalised journeys in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Not only does this enable operators to offer proactive and personalised experiences consistently, but based on the analysis, it helps target the right customers with the right services, at the right time. Even though customers are open to receiving new offers from mobile providers, if it is not provided in the right time or place, then it will likely be ignored.

By combining proactive service offerings with the appropriate context, telcos can acquire new customers and reduce churn with current customers who engage with service providers across multiple channels throughout the digital customer journey. With Next Best Engagement, telcos will ultimately be able to anticipate the fastest and most personal way to offer customers what they need, when they need it, through the most convenient channel for them.

Comptel will showcase the Next Best Engagement solution as a part of the “Maximising Engagement with Predictive Customer Journeys” Catalyst with Salesforce at TMForum Live! in Nice on May 15-18, 2017. Book a meeting with Comptel at TMForum Live! by emailing [email protected]. 

Six blind men and an OSS elephant

The concept of digital transformation can be massive… or it can stem from something much smaller.

In digital transformation, there’s a mantra of simplify then transform. That makes perfect sense, in alignment with, “The chess-board analogy,” but often overlooked.

But there’s another simplification perspective to take. Let’s take the 6 blind men and the elephant parable into consideration. Each of the six blind men gets a different perception of what they’re interacting with.

In the world of OSS, the blind men are like the 6 (or more) different departments – operations, business, IT, sales, marketing, executive, etc. Each interacts with the OSS elephant and each has a different experience with it.

The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or sand-pit environment is one great strategy to building momentum in large organisations. Identify something small that is at the heart of the solution – a place where all parties interact and get their chance to touch the new elephant. Then build something at that central point that presents something that’s encouraging / enticing to all who interact with it.

For a start, the cloud represents an environment that isn’t “owned” by any of the business units and isn’t bound up in all the security or other checks that slow delivery down. Secondly, with an MVP ensure you’re touching simulated components inside the cloud rather than exposed components inside the business (think “the implications of a handshake“). Thirdly, make it a sand-pit – segregated from production (and potentially from each of the six blind men) then encourage interactive play.

By Ryan Jeffery, Telecommunications consultant, author and founder of PassionateAboutOSS.com