Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
With the increased availability of high-speed networks and end users incorporating mobile into their lives in an increasing number of ways, the amount of data generated through these interactions is growing exponentially. In just a few weeks, a large mobile service provider can easily generate petabytes of data about its network, usage and customer experience.
This presents both challenges and opportunities to the world’s mobile service providers. What seems like a marketer’s dream – endless information about their target audiences’ habits and preferences – comes with the extremely difficult task of aggregating the data from often fragmented sources, sorting through it to find the information that matters most, and delivering it immediately in ways that are highly relevant.
Regardless of how difficult the task, it is absolutely critical that mobile service providers harness “big data” to retain and attract customers, as well as to generate incremental revenue. Below are a few strategies through which this can be achieved.
Engage potentially transient roamers
Today’s end users are connecting in increasingly diverse ways, particularly when roaming internationally. “Transient roamers” are international travelers who use paid Wi-Fi or local SIM cards as alternatives to traditional mobile roaming, and Syniverse calculated that this group spent a staggering $17 billion on these alternative connectivity methods in 2012.
The key factor driving end users to seek out inconsistent, fragmented connectivity options is fear of the unknown – namely, bill shock resulting from international mobile data usage. Mobile service providers should see an opportunity to proactively communicate with subscribers in real time before they become transient. This can be achieved by immediately offering personalized packages – such as day passes or allotments of usage for a fixed price – while providing enhanced transparency that incentivizes subscribers to use their mobile devices as if they were at home. This approach enhances the end-user experience, ensuring users do not have to contend with the complexities of alternative connectivity options while also helping service providers secure incremental revenue from the usage.
To offer this level of instantaneous and personalized engagement, operators must leverage big data strategically to enable real-time experience management. By monitoring their customers’ experiences as they happen, home service providers can immediately identify when their end users have landed in a foreign country and reach out to them immediately while consistently monitoring the quantity of data used in comparison to their plans. By providing proactive outreach with a tailored roaming package or real-time usage alerts, service providers are able to immediately quell fears of returning to a high bill and empower subscribers to use traditional mobile network connectivity instead of an alternative method.
Instantaneous analysis of big data is essential to enable real-time experience management. If mobile service providers analyze data only periodically, they won’t identify these potentially transient roamers until they’ve returned home, when the service providers have already missed the opportunity.
Minimize churn by maximizing satisfaction
Real-time experience management enabled by extracting timely and relevant insights from big data also is vital to minimizing churn. In particular, these capabilities are extremely useful in identifying and proactively notifying a mobile service provider of customers facing service interruptions. Those insights enable service providers to rapidly pinpoint the issue, reducing the chance that the customer could phone in an after-the-fact customer care call, share complaints with others on a social network, or, worse yet, take their business to a competitor. For example, if an end user from Buenos Aires lands in Paris and is unable to access data, the home service provider can recognize in real time that the user was incorrectly provisioned, fixing the issue before the end user realizes it has occurred.
This proactive approach saves money because the mobile service provider doesn’t have to cover the expense of costly customer service calls or increase spending on advertising and promotions to try to replace lost customers or overcome a tarnished reputation.
Give high-value customers the white-glove treatment
Real-time experience management capabilities derived from big data also provide opportunities for mobile service providers to finely segment their customer bases, ensuring high-value users have consistently great experiences. This analysis can and should be highly granular to ensure impact. For example, a service provider can place higher levels of monitoring and alerting on the extremely high-value users, including critical decision makers like C-level executives of key enterprise customers.
Mobile partnerships to build brands
For enterprises, a mobile strategy is critical today, as an Internet strategy was 15 years ago. For those strategies to be successful, these businesses must turn to their customers’ mobile experiences to build their brands.
Again, this comes back to being able to gain access to glean relevant, timely and actionable insights from big data about their customers, achieving real-time experience management.
For example, instantaneous insight into device location data gives credit card providers a new fraud detection tool that prevents charges from being accepted in a location where the card holder is not. This type of data also helps establishments such as hotels identify exactly when a guest is arriving to ensure personalized service and preparedness, which ultimately promotes brand affinity and ensures loyalty.
But enterprises have an added challenge in that they do not have direct access to the operators delivering service and thus may be missing out on critical information about the quality of service that their end users are receiving. The key to overcoming this challenge is forging closer relationships with mobile service providers that allow for the exchange of key, relevant information in a context that is permitted by the end user.
Because the experience of end users is shared by both their mobile operator and the service provider operating the application or issuing the message, it is in both parties’ best interest to implement solutions that offer opportunities for real-time experience management to elevate their respective brands in the marketplace.
These are just a few examples of how distilling relevant, real-time insights from big data can improve bottom lines while giving both mobile service providers and enterprises a competitive edge. To execute these strategies, the various mobile ecosystem players must engage an experienced business partner with expertise in managing sensitive data and its flow between the parties involved. For mobile service providers, this means higher efficiency and visibility into the experience that end users have both at home and while traveling. Enterprises need an intermediary with a reputation for excellence among the mobile ecosystem to facilitate the service provider relationships required for real-time customer experience management.
Now is the time for the world’s mobile service providers to put in place real-time experience management solutions that allow them to capitalize on the wealth of big data opportunities to advance customer care, ensure service access, grow revenues, and exceed end-user expectations.
Alfred de Cárdenas joined Syniverse in April 2008 and serves as COO leading a unified organization that ensures Syniverse’s solutions are aligned directly with the needs of its customers. In this role, he is responsible for the direction of Syniverse’s roaming, messaging and network lines of business in addition to the company’s global sales processes, methods, tools and global account coordination. He brought to Syniverse more than 20 years of experience in the global telecommunications industry. Before joining Syniverse, de Cárdenas was with Nortel Networks, most recently as GM of converged multimedia networks. He also held a number of other key leadership roles since joining Nortel in 1992, including VP positions in carrier support and operations, sales, marketing, customer care and network operations as well as assignments in Colombia and Brazil. He began his career as a senior engineer for Southern Bell. Fluent in English and Spanish, and conversational in Portuguese, de Cárdenas earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering from Florida International University and his master’s of business administration degree from Nova Southeastern University.
