Wireless carriers are concerned about increasing customer loyalty – and they should be – according to a new study released by WDS, a Xerox-owned company that provides customer experience management solutions to the wireless industry. The study of U.S. mobile phone users reveals that 36% of U.S. customers are considering leaving their mobile carrier in the next 12 months. Only 13% of customers show the level of loyalty that would prevent them from leaving for other competitive offers or because of service disruptions.
The WDS study also suggests that the number of customers at risk of switching could be underestimated by wireless carriers, since many existing measures of loyalty, such as customer satisfaction and net promoter scores, often deliver potentially misleading results.
The results of this study led WDS to analyze how wireless operators are using their customer relationship and experience solutions, and how they are (or aren’t) analyzing their data to get valuable information about customer behavior and loyalty.
Vivo, the Brazilian unit of Telefónica, has implemented a structured information environment. Leandro Andrade, director of business innovation, told an audience at this week’s TM Forum Latin America Summit in São Paulo, that in a very competitive market it is a challenge to make great use of information.
“We moved from decentralized data marts to an integrated data warehouse environment. We not only implemented an [enterprise data warehouse] EDW but also loaded the most relevant information for decision making,” Andrade said. Since then, Vivo has been able to support several areas based on analytical solutions.
Also at the summit, Tony Kalcina, TM Forum ambassador and Clarity founder, noted that customer experience management analytics drive network quality.
“A 5% increase in customer retention results in a 25% to 100% increase in profitability,” he said.
Kalcina pointed out that customer experience depends on “end-to-end” performance, consisting of customer experience management monitoring, analytics, diagnostics and recommended actions.
Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago has chosen to integrate its BSS/OSS processes and systems. At the TM Forum Latin America Summit, Hayden Mora, head of program management at TSTT, explained that fixed and mobile lines had separate systems of capture, management and billing, which resulted in the inability to cross-sell and up-sell. To transform service fulfillment and assurance, TSTT partnered with ConceptWave and Telcordia, along with IBM and Oracle.
At the summit, Sandro Simas, director of systems at the Vivendi-owned Brazilian service communication provider GVT, said the company has structured its back office to center on customers.
As such, business process management, enterprise service bus and applications were built to focus on customers. GVT used Oracle’s Siebel CRM and TOA mobile workforce management software.
What’s happening in the market:
- Astellia has partnered with the enterprise application software company SAP, aiming to boost the integration of the SAP Sybase IQ into Astellia’s Nova monitoring solution. Astellia’s solution is optimized for real-time, big data analytics and provides data manipulation and restitution capabilities that are at least 10 times faster than those of conventional transactional databases.
- Sandvine, provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators, announced it has received network policy control expansion orders from TDS Telecommunications Corp. Last year, TDS Telecom, an incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC), deployed Sandvine’s Fairshare Traffic Management and Business Intelligence products.
The telecom analytics series provides weekly insights on trends, new products and other topics that touch on the advantages and monetization opportunities of analytics tools for telecom operators, including big data, business intelligence, customer experience analysis and management, business analytics and network analytics.
