The Big Data Experience and Next-generation Care

By: Nibha Aggarwal

If there ever was an industry that epitomizes the term ‘big data’ both in scale and potential, communications would be it.  Service providers sit on massive amounts of data by nature of the business. The potential to turn this data into an economic asset that will allow the business to operate more efficiently, and serve and sell to customers more effectively, is particularly huge.  It presents an opportunity for service providers to understand each customer as an individual, pre-empt or mitigate their care needs, and identify the most beneficial moments of truth to offer new products and services.

Pre-emptively addressing care needs, in particular, is a great example for the potential of the big data experience.  By mitigating a care interaction, the service provider either provides a more efficient interaction at less cost, or hopefully eliminates the need for the interaction and its associated cost altogether.  But beyond this, and arguably even more importantly, the service provider delivered a better customer experience.  It’s the better experience that ultimately correlates to the loyalty and revenue generated by that subscriber.

The importance of proactive care is highlighted in a global survey of communication service subscribers sponsored by Amdocs and conducted by Coleman Parkes research.  Unsurprisingly, subscribers have high expectations of their service provider, which includes a flawless device and service experience.  If subscribers experience any issue using their device or service, their satisfaction drops immediately.  Once satisfaction drops, their likelihood to recommend their service provider to family and friends (Net Promoter Score), and willingness to purchase more, drops correspondingly.  As it is not realistic to eliminate the occurrence of service and device issues altogether, the Amdocs survey instead asked consumers how proactive care and corresponding notifications would impact the subscriber’s opinion and satisfaction with their service provider.  Despite the fact that the subscriber had an issue to start with, if their service provider was proactive in flagging the issue and directing them to resolution, this would help the situation considerably.  Even better, if the service provider was able to identify and fix the issue before the customer was even aware of it, they would score high marks, and in fact could even boost that subscriber’s Net Promoter Score.

To execute proactive experiences, service providers must tap into the trove of data that constitutes and maps the customer journey.  This requires real-time analysis of a subscriber’s assigned products, services, location, usage, billing, interaction history, social media posts, channel preferences, and the list can go on.  But unleashing the power of big data analytics is inconsequential unless that analysis can output and execute intelligent conclusions that are actionable.  So what does this look like in the real world?

Amdocs launched a solution in this space to address this very issue. The Amdocs Proactive Care solution processes real-time data from several data sources, applies sophisticated intelligence and decisioning to identify occurrence and likelihood of issues, and then executes context-specific actions to address these issues.  Amdocs Proactive Care does three things for an end-to-end process:

• First, it monitors events over the entire customer lifecycle, or journey, to create full customer context. These are events such as account, billing, payments, orders, activations, interactions, etc. It transforms the data, and stores the historical and current information. In addition, the solution continuously monitors events generated by Billing and CRM systems, and other sources, to understand the changes in customer context.
  
  
• Second, the solution uses the customer context, trends, and customer behavior to determine the status and characteristics of each individual customer. It then predicts the likely reasons for a customer to call or take actions to anticipate customer issues in real time. Based on this data, the solution identifies the root cause of that problem, and creates the best action plan for the customer. Based on service provider’s policy and business rules, the action is different for each customer.
  
  
• Third, it addresses the issue in real time to proactively execute the next best action. Once a recommended action is determined, the notification framework is used to execute outbound actions for proactive resolution of issues. In some of situations, the action is to pre-emptively fix the issue proactively, to eliminate or shed the potential call – even before the customer is aware of the problem. In some other situations, the action could be to deflect the potential call to lower cost channels to resolve the issue. In situations when the customer does call, the solution proactively routes the call to the right agent. It also guides the agent by performing customer background research, finding root cause of the issue, and directing the agent to resolve the issue.