Comptel User Group 2012: Going Where the Puck Will Be

Just a year ago, Comptel was discussing data as the new oil – touting the message that the key to future communications service provider (CSP) revenue is tapping into the information at their fingertips to better understand their customers. At this year’s Comptel User Group, CEO Juhani Hintikka took this a step further, explaining that it’s also about making data beautiful.

In his keynote presentation to customers, partners and industry analysts, Juhani examined the key factors impacting today’s telecommunications landscape. These included efficiently employing assets, monetising data services, differentiating with personalised customer information and driving contextual intelligence for meaningful actions. However, as famous hockey player (or as Juhani put it, the famous philosopher) Wayne Gretzky said: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” The same is true for the telecommunications industry – we need to increasingly predict what is important to customers rather than simply reacting.

So how do you know where the puck will be? Analytics can play a key role. For instance, Comptel’s analytics product has been over 80% accurate with results but, as Juhani stressed, this is only valuable if CSPs take action based on these insights – this can be anything from provisioning to targeted campaigns or beyond. They must capitalise on the opportunity to understand the uniqueness of each customer or circumstance and convert that into actionable intelligence.

Ultimately, contextual intelligence is about getting the basics right for profitability, churn reduction, and an increase in wallet share and brand recognition. And as the amount of data continues to increase, problems will likely arise. But if the telecommunications industry can embrace this approach aided by an event-analysis-action strategic framework to get the most value possible out of that data, the opportunity will only be that much bigger. If we can accomplish this, like Juhani stated, let the data grow…we can and will ultimately achieve the goal of making data beautiful.

Two Strong Approaches for Facilitating Improved CSP Business Performance

It’s been some time since I last shared updates on Comptel’s business and strategy, but I was inspired to blog after listening to our team’s briefing for Management World 2012.

Over the past several months, I have continued to travel and meet with customers and partners around the world. It is interesting to see that everybody wants to become more efficient, while growing their top lines and improving their business performance—but in the various regions, the approaches communications service providers (CSP) have taken to achieve these goals have been very different.

Recalling these dialogs, I am confident that the event-analysis-action strategic framework Comptel has developed is capable of addressing most of their needs and seeing through their business objectives. So, I’m excited to highlight two strong approaches for facilitating improved CSP business performance, which we are on hand to discuss and demonstrate this week in Dublin.

Let me first touch upon Contextual Intelligence for Telco (CIQ4T), a completely new approach that can help CSPs take customer experience management to the next level and fully maximise their business opportunities. The concept comes from another discipline but is one we felt was critical for CSPs to leverage.

Utilising advanced predictive analytics technology, CIQ4T allows CSPs to gain an understanding of the uniqueness of individual subscribers and circumstances, and leverage that knowledge to predict behaviours and market changes, in turn, reducing churn, boosting customer engagement and realising better business.

What does that mean exactly? As Comptel’s vice president of analytics, Matti Aksela, shares in this video, the key characteristics in CIQ4T are contextual real-time insights, advanced predictive analytics and the fact that all of this intelligence can be translated into timely and relevant action. By leveraging historical and real-time data and predictive modelling to provide unique insights into future customer behaviours, CSPs can determine more targeted, appropriate and timely offerings for increased ARPU.

CIQ4T also provides the foundation for dynamic profiling and segmentation for service bundles and campaigns, makes mobile advertising more relevant and informs network operations with an estimation of usage volumes and types of devices in use for optimised asset utilisation. All of this contributes to most of the areas where CSPs want to focus—and so far, our customer implementations and proof-of-concepts have demonstrated encouraging results. One of the cases, which targeted a specific customer segment (top 10% of monthly users),has already showed a 21% reduction in churn and 25% increase in revenue.

This is only the first step in bringing the CIQ4T approach to life, but I’m expecting it to become a necessity for CSPs, as more recognise that their customers want personalised, real-time interaction and the importance of targeting the right individual with the right offering at the right time.

Next, I’d like to mention the progress of our fulfillment offering and how our Next Generation Fulfillment strategy has come to fruition. Likewise, this is a much-needed component for CSPs to ensure a high customer experience, particularly at the first point of engagement, in order to remain competitive and to drive profitable business.

Our real-time, high-performance, catalog-driven and fully integrated fulfillment platform monitors and expedites the end-to-end process from service order capture to service delivery with precision and with minimal human intervention, which greatly reduces the likelihood of failed orders, disappointed customers and, ultimately, lost revenue.

We will be announcing in the coming weeks and months how CSPs are leveraging Comptel Fulfillment to accelerate time-to-revenue for new products; support service innovation to help gain first-mover advantage; and ensure accurate and consistent product launches and deployments, optimising the customer experience and leading to improved retention and ARPU.

Again, I am confident that this development will meet the changing service aggregation needs, enable true innovation for market leadership and set CSPs out on the right path in today’s increasingly complex telecoms environment.

I hope we will have a chance to ‘co’nverse on facilitating improved CSP business performance at Management World 2012 this week, and wish everyone a very productive and ‘co’llaborative tradeshow.