The Big Deal with Big Data
Knowing everything about the ways users engage with the network can also help operators understand how to up-sell services in a meaningful way that won't turn their customers off.
Knowing everything about the ways users engage with the network can also help operators understand how to up-sell services in a meaningful way that won't turn their customers off. That offers
opportunities for everything from becoming a middle-man broker for advertising--like offering location and customer preference-specific offers and coupons--to up-selling bandwidth and other
services at the operator level. When you know everything about what your customer is doing on the network, there are limitless opportunities to enhance their service experience and prevent churn.
“You can see where the customer is struggling,” Cantor says. “Then you can say, 'this area isn't provisioned right.'”
He adds that if you have visibility into where a customer is having issues, you can be pro-active and reach out to the customer, offer them a credit and submit a trouble ticket so they don't run
into the same issues again. Finally, Lenns adds that Big Data helps marketing departments measure KPIs and customer uptake on new marketing campaigns much more quickly than before, allowing them
to tweak offers in real-time for maximum return.
“It's like they have levers they can adjust to maximize the campaign,” Lenns adds.
The Future of Big Data
Aside from leveraging Big Data to know more about the customer's usage and experience, ultimately, Big Data can help create a network smart enough to optimize itself in real-time at any given
moment. It's what Lenns calls a “closed-feedback loop” from analytics to policy. It creates a network that is continually and dynamically adjusting.
There are also developments on the horizon in labs across the telecommunications industry that take real-time analytics and feed it back to the network in order
for the network to automatically make bandwidth adjustments based on customer behaviors—and even charge them for it. But Cantor says with the growing levels of data being extracted from the
network, carriers will need to increasingly consider the legal implications.
“When I think about what's going on, there's the technical guys, the financial guys, and I think there's going to be a need to have more legal guys to help make smart decisions about how to use
data,” Cantor says.
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) has given operators the ability to see usage activity with a startling level of detail. But, Cantor adds that a sub-set of DPI, Deep Packet Classification (DPC)
provides the data carriers need without the same level of content detail, in an effort to protect customer privacy.
The promise of Big Data is alluring, but fully realizing all the benefits Big Data has to offer will be slow in coming. But rather than being daunted, carriers should start leveraging
communications technology solutions to address their immediate needs like churn reduction, increased quality of service, and bandwidth management.
Start with something rather small and isolated instead of trying to boil the ocean,” Bartels says. “Each project will help you better understand the available tools and systems and how to model
the system according to the requirements.”
CSPs know their customers better than their own mothers. They even know if they're calling them on Mother's Day. But at a time when the rest of the pack is focused on rolling out new services,
the CSPs that are able to pivot toward a data analytics-focused operation will win the customer for the long haul. Maybe their mothers, too.
