The rules in telecom industry no longer remain the same. With the number of unique mobile subscribers having surpassed 5 billion people in 2017, and set to reach 71% of the world’s population or 5.9 billion by 2025[1], telecom operators have a tremendous amount of data at their disposal. For instance, a CSP with 8 million prepaid mobile subscribers would typically generate approximately 30 million Call Data Records (CDRs) daily, which over a year would reach 11 billion. This amount is multiplied if post-paid and fixed lines services are added in. While traditional analytics has played an important part in enabling basic customer insights, it is not enough considering the competition and disruption the telecom industry is currently facing.
Top 5 Advantages of Contextual Marketing in Telecom sector
Contextual Marketing, which uses big data analytics, to gather in-depth insights on customers, can revolutionize the industry in several ways. Here are five ways that the telecom industry can utilize the potential Contextual Marketing to their advantage.
- Gain enhanced customer insights
Telecoms have access to tons of structured and unstructured data. Big data can be leveraged to build detailed micro-segmented customer profiles based on customer demographics, billing data, marketing data, customer lines and products, carriage usage, and digital usage. This can help differentiate customer service models and develop individualized offer recommendations. For instance, digital usage such as websites visited, searches made, and video content downloaded, which point to what content is searched and brought online, can be used to create customer-centric KPIs and targeted offers. - Reduce customer churn
Price points, service quality, lack of customer service, billing disputes, and new competition are the most common reasons for customer churn in the telecom industry. Machine learning algorithms and predictive analysis gain uniformed insight on a range of pain points from social media sentiment analysis to details of calls made to customer care centers. This enables the telecom to determine unseen patterns, identify potential churners, and develop accurate marketing strategy to influence and prevent customer churn. - Experience increased revenues:
Forrester’s Customer Lifecycle Survey,[2] found 73% customers citing valuing their time as the most important thing that companies can do to provide them with good customer service. This has resulted in web and mobile self- service apps, overtaking all other channels of customer service. For Telecommunication companies, mobile apps also offer a large, rich, reliable, and representative source of data, which can be mined for insights and customer behavior patterns. It can be also used to identify the right up-selling and cross-selling opportunities that can be managed within the app itself, without the use of text or voice. - Enhance customer experience
Research shows that eight in 10 customers will switch to a competitor due to poor customer service[3].The telecom industry now encompasses a greater role—the industry is no longer limited to its technological abilities of a mere provider of infrastructure, bandwidth, and capacity. Telecoms are now required to serve as a provider of valuable experiences for their customers. For instance, marketing empowered with real-time and contextual analytics ensures that customers gain a personalized experience with services, offers and interactions that are valuable to them instead of a generic spam noise. Predictive analytics, which predicts likely events, outcomes and services, can help create a customer service strategy that can proactively engage appropriate customers with relevant messages. - Decrease overheads
Telecoms employing Contextual Marketing solutions are further entitled to significant savings on indirect and overhead cost, as they require no additional resources to gather data or to run campaigns. A typical Contextual Marketing solution a requires a minimum number of resources (often no more than a single person) to manage the integrated platform, where everything is available real-time, enabling the user to run and execute campaigns in just a few minutes. Overheads are further cut with a cost-effective hardware set-up that is one-third the size of a conventional hardware system.
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Predictions by IDC [4] forecast that by 2020, prescriptive analytics built on cognitive computing functionality will be used 50% of all business analytics software. This makes it even more urgent for telecoms to use utilize the wealth of information about their customers behaviors, movements, and preferences to their advantage.
A Contextual Marketing solution is the telecom industry’s best response to today’s big data opportunity. Contextual Marketing applies machine learning algorithms, to analyze customer behavior from structured and unstructured data. This provides telecoms with patterns and context for each customer, creating relevant and real-time marketing campaigns.
[1] https://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/The-Mobile-Economy-Global-2018.pdf
