Tapping on Customer Data

By Syeda Afjalina Wasi, Tecnotree CRM Business Analyst

In the competitive Telecom industry, innovation is an immaculate articulation of art and science. Needs today go beyond the traditional realms of solution scope and offering; focused and individually relevant offerings matter more and more. To create these offerings businesses rely on huge customer information sets maintained in large databases. Effectively managing and using such information has proved to be a challenge though.

In the dealings with our service provider customers, we’ve often heard problems of the following sort:

• “Our profitability hasn’t improved, although we have been acquiring new customers”
• “We had an extremely good product launch, initial adoptions were great, yet, customers didn’t stick to our products in long run”  
• “We want to bring back our old customers, but not sure how”
• “We understand losing a customer is expensive, yet we’ve not been able to check the churn”

Addressing such critical issues needs a much deeper penetration of customer information in the business processes. Such strong integration of customer information requires providing a unique view of customer to all the functions of business, commonly referred to as, 360 degrees view of customer. 360 degree view of customer allows the customer element to be part of the end to end process design of a business. 

Strategy – How well is the customer made a part of the corporate strategy? Conceptually, every business makes the customer central to the strategy of business. However, capturing the real essence of customer needs, and aligning the business processes around it is challenging. The old techniques of planning for customer-oriented design are obsolete; customer needs today are rapidly changing due to advent of new technologies. New communication devices, such as the modern mobile phones or tablet PCs are converging world around a person in one device. The thin line between professional and personal data is slowly diluting. Our previous blog on attitudinal analysis describes the aspect of reading customer behaviour and attitude in this new world. Attitudinal analysis can provide clues to creation of a sustainable strategy for CSPs.

Marketing – Sending the right brand message through the most relevant means is fundamental to an effective acquisition or retention of customers. 

• Marketing Insights – Customer data can provide valuable insights on how well a brand is received by customers. Providing deeper view into creation of the most relevant offers and promotions for the customers. In addition, good customer data analysis can also be determinant of what channels could be most effective means to promote the products and services.
• Build Loyalty – Customers’ demands are rapidly changing due to the new communication technologies, such as new generation mobile phones, tablet PCs etc. Current adoption of such technologies is also in the process changing the customer behaviour and demands. Building loyalty in such rapidly changing market is walking on thin ice. The only way to create loyalty in such market is to create offers pertinent to the current customer needs.
• Efficient Marketing – Analysing customer information can help in narrowing down the choices to the most effective segment and medium of conducting a marketing event. Hence, with targeted marketing, a company can perform the business with a much higher operational efficiency.

Sales – Selling effectively is fundamental to creating a long-term sales strategy. Rapidly changing market is forcing sales teams to sell products and services efficiently before the market renders them obsolete. In order to create a sales strategy, which sustains longer in the market, sales groups need to consistently innovate their sales practices.

• Sell More effectively – Sell Smarter is the new slogan. Rapidly adapting sales strategy to changing needs of market, higher collaboration across the teams and immaculate execution are key to selling today. 
• Eliminate Surprises – Good analysis of customer data can help look into future, and hence prepare for the adversities and eliminate the surprises during the sales cycles.

Products – Creating right product mix is more than just looking at existing services and bundle them to create an extensive offering. Customers today do not want to see products, which are not relevant for them. They expect the CSPs to understand their needs and recommend the most effective product for them. This requires CSPs to design products with the flexibility to adopt to the market needs. 

Services – Services are key to retention of customers, more often than not customer churn due to ineffective services.

• Improve Customer Satisfaction – Give customers what they really need, and customer satisfaction index would improve automatically. Being proactive towards offering the right services could keep customer satisfied, which in turn also ensure loyalty.
• Increase Service Effectiveness – Creating focused areas which effectively offers customers the most optimal services can not only elevate customer satisfaction but also dramatically bring down operational costs.  

Pricing – Product and Service designers are always face this dilemma, if they price them too low, it would immediately affect profitability, if they price them too high customers could potentially move to competitors. Analysing customer data could provide the answer to this dilemma. Offerings can be optimally priced at the most convenient range for customers without affecting the profitability.

In conclusion, in order to create an effective business, the customer data must run through the entire system playing a decisive role in each decision. Only by deeply integrating customer information in the system, a sustainable business model can be created.