The Intelligence Playbook for Communications Service Providers
Here’s how a smart data strategy and intelligent analytics help providers deliver fast, flexible, and frictionless customer experiences.
Communications service providers are facing the ultimate paradox: Connecting with customers in real time and creating unified customer journeys are among their top priorities, and also their top challenges.
Why? Data silos were caused by mergers, acquisitions, and a culture that prioritised internal competition. In fact, nearly all (89%) IT leaders say data silos inhibit digital transformation initiatives. And that’s held service providers back from connecting the dots at the same time they are working to become more customer-centric.
This is a hurdle providers must overcome because accessing locked-away data is the key to delivering the convenient, consistent, and customised experiences that customers expect. In fact, those that pivot to a customer-centric, data-driven approach can perform better on key business metrics like revenue growth, customer retention, and profitability.
How can communications service providers build a cohesive data strategy that unites the organisation, anticipates customer needs, and keeps them one step ahead of the competition? This playbook has everything you need to unlock, understand, and take action on your data.
Overcome Challenges
Find Opportunities
Chapter 1: Unlock Your Data
A typical customer transaction crosses 35 technology systems and only one-third of that data is integrated. Employees toggling between systems or not having access to certain data leads to disconnected customer experiences. The most common scenario is subscribers having to repeat personal information when they call with a question about their service.
How can communications service providers unlock the critical insights across the organisation that will improve the customer experience, no matter where or how they interact?
What does a “complete view of the customer” really mean? It includes every customer interaction and preference that relates to a company — calls, page views, campaign interactions, event attendance, buying power, tech use, and more. Basically, anything and everything that helps to better serve, identify, and predict customer needs.
Service providers can connect siloed data and siloed teams in order to achieve that 360-degree customer view by replatforming in the cloud. This requires a business support systems (BSS) layer that integrates existing digital marketing, commerce, and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms in order to:
- Consolidate the number of tools to avoid toggling between platforms
- Empower employees to deliver the right experiences at the right time and anticipate the next-best actions
- Make customer data easily shareable across the organisation
- Keep the company flexible and connected
With an agile, cloud-based solution, providers reduce the technical debt that results in rework and increased costs. That’s why research suggests that 50% of commuications service provider software spending will be directly related to cloud by 2025.
Put your customers at the center of everything you do
Traditionally, organisations integrate data using custom point-to-point code, but custom code is the enemy of speed and agility. It breaks easily and creates bottlenecks because there are few people who understand it.
With an application programming interface (API) strategy, providers enable an extensible application network with massive reuse. The APIs act as building blocks — wrapping various components, such as inventory data or order status, so that they are easily discovered, understood, consumed, and secured. Different teams easily access data and digital capabilities, while IT manages and secures the data at scale. This increases organisational agility and helps deliver connected experiences faster because it eliminates the bottlenecks. In fact, 53% of IT leaders say APIs improve productivity.
An effective API management platform helps communications service providers by:
- Improving operational efficiency and enabling new market opportunities powered at web speed instead of brittle point-to-point approaches
- Unlocking data and processes from operations and business support systems to create consistent customer experiences across channels
- Accelerating new product and channel development by empowering external ecosystems (for example, the network of producers, consumers, products, and services in a marketplace)
To successfully enable a lean tech stack using an API strategy, providers must bring employees together. The key is to encourage every department to share, collaborate, and deliver integrated experiences down to the most junior employees. How?
- Share goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) with peers outside your team — even those that don’t normally work together
- Explore ways to help each other by fostering cross-functional collaboration
- Make data actionable by understanding what customers need, when they need it, and why
However, when it comes to meeting customer expectations, the buck doesn’t stop at the technology. Once service providers have the right infrastructure, they need to rethink how they organise, access, and make use of their data. More on that in the next section.
Next: Chapter 2: Understand Your Data
See how to:
- Use data visualisation to surface trends
- Enable sales and service departments to maximise productivity
- Apply artificial intelligence to understand next best actions
