Voice of Customer Analytics - a managed service offering for CSPs
In the wake of the global economic crisis, firms across industries and geographies have come under tremendous pressure to reduce costs. Most have responded by adopting a 'Capex Freeze' and 'Opex Reduction' mentality, which has been evident in their spending decisions, including those involving their outsourcing partners. Communication Service Providers (CSP) has been no exception!
Against this backdrop, Analytics as a service offering assumes significance, considering its potential to deliver quick and tangible Return On Investment (ROI) against relatively minor investments on the part of CSPs.
The entry of non traditional players to the CSP market and subsequent change in market dynamics, market saturation e.g. UK has more SIM cards than people and the continuous drop in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) had already made 'customer experience management' the number one priority for CSPs. Recession has served to further galvanize the efforts of CSPs in this regard.
Analytics, through its ability to identify critical customer signals, can provide immense value add to CSPs in this regard. Interpreting these early warning signals can lead to devising of effective programs which will enable CSPs to offer positive 'customer experience' aiding increased loyalty and usage.
One area where analytics delivers stand-out value is capturing the Voice of Customer (VoC). Every customer interaction is a rich source of information on customer experience and behavior. Leveraging this 'Voice of Customer' information, through the use of analytics, can help positively impact ARPU. Unfortunately, the unstructured nature of this information makes it very difficult to mine using ordinary analytical techniques. Analytic tools which can develop semantic insights from unstructured data by leveraging natural language processing capabilities are needed to provide real time intelligent analytics about customer experience and usage.
The insights thus gained can be used in two ways:
• Target a customer segment, eg. fine tune market offerings for a customer segment based on real time customer feedback gained through this type of VoC analytics tool
• Target individual customer, eg. Enhance up-sell & cross sell opportunities during interaction of the customer with a customer care representative, create Just-in time marketing campaigns, etc.
The way forward would be to develop analytics as an end-to-end managed service offering which would cover the entire spectrum of solution development, solution testing and subsequent solution delivery. Such an initiative would be of tremendous interest to CSPs as the risk of 'execution failure' is mitigated with the onus of successful analytics project implementation being passed on to their outsourcing partner.
Comments
I completely agree that Customer analytics is becoming more important and relevant these days with the competitive pressure and the ARPU pressure.
Over the past decade, CSPs have made heavy investments in their OSS/BSS infrastructure. These systems, which house critical customer, product and market data are more designed to take in and store data in an organized way. Most of these systems don't have the capability to build analytics and intelligence around the gold mine of data the CSPs have stored within their OSS/BSS systems.
Given this, a comprehensive customer analytics and customer value management solution becomes critical. Such solutions can help CSPs identify their high value customers, segment their customers base and target each segment with the most relevant sales and support processes.
Commented by: Sandeep Chandraseskar Seshadri | August 30, 2009 9:44 PM