Telecom operators are looking at telecom analytics solutions to better understand their customers and develop more sophisticated and personalized offerings. Although more in-depth adoption of these tools has not yet happened, telecom operators have used analytics for quite some time.
Russian telecom operator Mobile TeleSystems is one of them. The telecom group offers mobile and fixed voice, broadband and pay-TV as well as content and entertainment services in one of the world’s fastest growing regions. Including its subsidiaries, MTS serves more than 100 million mobile subscribers and holds GSM licenses in Russia, Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Armenia and Belarus. MTS’ current market cap is about $19.5 billion.
To better understand how MTS has used telecom analytics, RCR Wireless News interviewed MTS CIO Frederic Vanoosthuyze:
RCR Wireless News: Adopting telecom analytics solutions is a huge trend right now. What have you seen in this area?
Frederic Vanoosthuyze: I am a great defender of business intelligence and analytics because of the huge importance of knowing about your customers. We have some analytics tools inside MTS. Data analytics is important for telecom operators. I’ve also noticed a customer experience evolution, moving from mass understanding to individual offerings.
RCRWN: What challenges does the evolution of the customer experience bring?
Vanoosthuyze: The challenge is to make a different offering for each individual, and to do that, it is necessary to have an automated billing system; the administration of all these different offerings seems unmanageable: to look at customers individually and provide segmented offerings. So, I would say that it is necessary to identify one [profile] and gather many in a pool.
RCRWN: How do you see the advent of big data analytics?
Vanoosthuyze: I am probably not like all CIOs regarding big data. I personally believe that big data is adding more noise than really identifying customers’ needs. Indeed, it is a great tool to identify trends and the evolution of customer behavior. But I don’t believe big data is the proper tool for mobile operators because we want to understand customers as individuals not as a group.
RCRWN: You don’t think big data analytics could be beneficial?
Vanoosthuyze: To use big data to analyze network information is fine because we control our network; we know the quality of the data. But when we start to use unstructured data from social media to try to identify how to better serve customers, I think the risk of missing the target is too high. Big data is a good source of information if you want to find and analyze trends.
RCRWN: There seems to be a trend toward combining different sources of analytics. What do you think?
Vanoosthuyze: We might merge different silos, and I am convinced that we can create value if we can guarantee the quality of data. We are doing some integration with ERP, CRM, BI because it has real value, and we can identify transactions. We are merging these sources of information to get better insights. But we won’t merge these with social media, for example, because we cannot certify this kind of data.
>>> Be sure to check out RCR Wireless News’ feature report about how carriers can take advantage of analytics solutions to turn data into information assets and on how carriers can leverage big data, business intelligence and customer analytics to drive revenue, reduce churn and improve network performance.
Breaking down silos
Are analytics solutions the tools that chief marketing officers, CIOs and CTOs need to break through their organizational barriers? RCR Wireless News posed this question in a video interview with Matti Aksela, VP of analytics at Comptel.
Matti Aksela also spoke about how communication service providers should break down silos to adapt to customers’ individual evolving needs faster, and how telecom operators could apply predictive analytics to big data to make new offers when opportunities arise.
More news from the telecom analytics market:
Big data fueling subscriber data management spending spree: The global subscriber data management market, including software and services for mobile and fixed-line networks, grew 45% in 2012 to $792 million, according to a report by the market research firm Infonetics Research. As the report notes, operators are increasingly looking to take on the role of trusted identity providers, handling authentication and authorization transactions between customers and third parties such as retailers, banks and over-the-top providers.
Partnership: The customer experience analytics provider Aito Technologies announcedit will provide Anritsu early access to Aito CEA 6, its next generation analytics software solution, for integration into Anritsu’s Advanced CEM solution.
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. Also, be sure to check out the video interviews about telecom analytics at RCRTV.
