As they face innovations in new services, rising customer expectations, and intense competition, operators look for fresh ways to obtain and deliver new efficiencies, better quality, new revenue, and a better customer experience. One way is by turning to data analytics. There is, however, more to Big Data than just vacuuming up information. How can data provide actionable insights, drive better decisions, and delight customers?
Big data provides an unparalleled opportunity to understand the quality and causes of customer experience. But it’s like your favorite all-you-can-eat seafood buffet: ingesting data is simple. Digesting the data is another matter. An operator can build a massive data lake containing every iota of information the network generates only to end up floundering in an attempt to make sense of it all.
Stocking the Lake with the Right Fish
To turn data into actionable insights, operators need to apply both the right expertise and the right tools from the very start. “We don’t want to have everything in a lake,” advises Neil Lilley, Product Marketing Manager for Analytics and Assurance at Ericsson. “You want to have the right things in the lake.”
Each customer wants to experience the journey a little differently, and from any portal of choice, with total consistency. An early adopter’s idea of what matters is very different from a gamer’s or a shopper’s or a sports fan’s. So for each customer, the operator needs to know: Is video loading speed or resolution primary? Voice quality or coverage? With enough—and the right kind of—data, operators can coordinate a personalized experience for each user.
Drawing Actionable Insights from Your Data
A real time, multivendor, cross-domain, big data analytics platform, Ericsson Expert Analytics is one tool that produces such actionable insights about customer experience and customer behavior at every step of the journey.
Ericsson Expert Analytics avoids the pitfalls of many other approaches that dump the information into an unmanageable “data lake.” Real time data correlation, coupled with machine intelligence, provides actionable insights about customer symptoms, root causes and next best actions, and reveals opportunities for you to step in to intervene with little handholding. These data-driven insights can then direct decisions and even automate actions across marketing, customer care, operations and planning, reducing handling time, rebound rate and escalations for customer-impacting events. Operators can then leverage customer behavior insights to drive targeted retention and upsell-offer recommendations.
Gartner found that “one of the most mature solutions in the industry, Ericsson’s big data analytics platform helps CSPs leverage existing OSS/BSS infrastructures. The platform provides predictive analytics and machine-learning algorithms that drive decision support and automated action — for end-to-end business, IT and network use cases.” (Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operations Support Systems, November 2017)
Operators are looking for big data analytics investments that produce big dividends. Ericsson Expert Analytics can be one effective tool on the road to delighting customers and efficiently delivering a superior experience.
For more info: ericsson.com/expertanalytics.
