New Northstream White Paper Explores How CSPs Can Leverage Analytics to Reap Business Benefits

This week, management consulting firm Northstream released a whitepaper showcasing how advanced analytics can help communications service providers (CSPs) improve all areas of their businesses. “Analytics Beyond the Hype” offers readers an overview of analytics in the telco space, demonstrates case studies from analytics vendors (including Comptel) and explores strategies that CSPs can apply to their business models today.

Specifically, the whitepaper charts the evolution of analytics from silo-specific, disorganized data to more consolidated efforts, as CSPs attempt to derive value from their Big Data and achieve their business goals. While analytics are not new, Northstream writes, the application of analytics to cross-departmental data is ground-breaking for many operators. In the past, traditional reporting has been limited to hard statistics like the state of the network, customer count and finances.

But that’s all changing.

New Analytics, New Opportunities

Northstream found that CSPs that are exploring the most advanced analytics tools are using data to build predictive models and real-time engines for offers that can immediately meet customer needs. Additionally, there’s a noticeable trend moving from mass marketing to personalised, individual marketing.

These developments in the world of Big Data analytics are imperative for CSPs looking to grow their businesses. Northstream states that, among European CSPs, ARPU has decreased by 6.6 percent year over year. Telco services are getting commoditised, and the market saturated, so the solution is for operators to differentiate by using their data.

Some suggested analytics strategies from Northstream include:

• Reducing churn via predictive analytics
• Making customer acquisition more cost-effective with targeted marketing
• Operating networks more efficiently by automatically monitoring asset and capacity management
• Tailoring offers to customers to increase ARPU

We were honoured to be included among the experienced CSP analytics vendors Northstream worked with on this study and encourage everyone to read it!

Download the White Paper!

Survey: Customers Yearn for the Personal Touch from Mobile Operators

It’s no secret that customer experience is a crucial element to communications service providers’ (CSPs) business growth strategies. Last year, I talked about the necessity to anticipate customer needs to help accomplish this, as highlighted by a survey conducted with research firm Vanson Bourne. This year, we worked with the company again to gain a global understanding of subscribers’ feelings toward their CSPs and found that they indeed welcome, and in fact desire, this personalised communication at every touch point. This includes from the first interaction when joining the service (35%), to when they are experiencing issues with the service (61%), to when their needs are changing (40%).

When would you like to have more personalised help/contact from your operator?

The good news for CSPs is that these interactions can help recoup the 20% of revenue that is currently being spent on churn compensation and retention, according to telecommunications industry consultant tefficient. While this number is staggering, it also means there is a huge cost-savings opportunity – if CSPs can earn customer loyalty. For one, churn prevention can be significantly reduced as, currently, more than one-third of consumers indicated that they might consider changing their mobile operators now if they could.

Would you like to change your operator now if you could?

Adding to this, there is a significant revenue opportunity to be had if CSPs personally interacted more often with customers.  For instance, almost two-thirds of consumers said that they would like to download large files to their devices more often if they had a better rate plan for their mobile data, better bandwidth or a better device, and nearly half (49%) would pay for a temporary upgrade to download those files more quickly and improve their viewing experience, if offered.  On average, consumers are willing to spend $3.80 for a temporary service upgrade—accounting for an increase in ARPU of 12 percent.

If your mobile operator offered you a temporary bandwidth boost / data consumption upgrade for a small charge, how much would you pay?

As I mentioned in today’s press release, the key to making this a reality and, ultimately, to earn customer loyalty, is through contextual intelligence at every touch point. As the survey results show, consistent, personalised interaction puts CSPs one step closer to winning consumers’ hearts, more efficiently utilising assets and profitably monetising their offerings.

Data for this survey was gathered from consumers in Brasil, Chile, France, Germany, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and Vietnam. A full copy of the research report will be available at Mobile World Congress (25-28 February 2013 in Barcelona) in Hall 6 at Stand 6C30, or by contacting [email protected]. You can visit our show microsite as well, for further examples of intelligence at every touch point.

The Future of Mobile Business Intelligence

There’s an interesting intersection between the popularity of mobile devices and the appetite for business intelligence (BI). Inevitably, the demand to display and interact with BI on mobile devices is growing and will continue to do so as more mobile technology supports this function. Already, we have tablets and smartphones with high-quality displays and interactive capabilities – but this is just the beginning, if you take into account the full potential for mobile BI.

Mobile BI is mostly relevant in the consumption of information, which is reflected in the need for simpler interactions in BI infrastructures. After all, nobody wants to be writing complex code, like SQL, on their smartphones. Rather, one of the key benefits of a successful BI system is the ability to show the same information to all users. For instance, dashboard reporting with drill down functionality and reports that scale easily across devices will be vital for success. And the more access points there are, the more important this standardization is.

Let me also say, however, that mobile BI will not – and should not – replace existing BI systems. Instead, mobile BI should complement existing systems by providing organisations with added speed and flexibility for consuming the available information. I also believe the move to mobile will give even more importance to more advanced analytical methods. For example, the ability to easily, effectively and accurately segment data based on certain attributes or to combine relevant information, such as churn predictions, into the revenue forecasts, as well as data visualisation approaches will come to the forefront. This allows for the information to be accessed – in a relatively refined form – across the entire organisation.

In other words, I see the advances in mobile BI being very much complementary to the other movements we are seeing in BI and analytics as a whole – bringing easier and more operational access, through complementary methods, such as predictive and advanced analytics. This, in turn, provides more refined data in a form that is easy to utilise across the organisation to maximise effectiveness of — not only the BI and analytical tools — but the people using the information generated. The latter point, being able to flexibly but securely access the information when and where it is needed to minimise “information lag”, is certainly a strong value proposition and will help mobile BI gain its foothold.