Real-time Customer Data Analysis as Enabler for Enhanced Customer Experience
By: Sanjay Kumar
The explosion in the mobile communications marketplace has had a profound impact around the world and across all walks of life, including the changes in human behavior brought about by mobile
devices. Marshall McLuhan’s famous expression “The medium is the message” may best describe this phenomenon: mobile devices are at the center of our cultural transformation.
As smartphones and tablets extend the diversity of applications and uses, our dependency on these devices has increased our expectations of mobile service providers. Consumers are demanding
higher levels of service and interaction, and therefore are more willing to change providers if their demands aren’t met.
Providers now face greater challenges in differentiating their service offerings from those of their competitors while still maintaining their average revenue per user (ARPU). Between the ease of
switching services with number portability and the growth in the prepaid model, consumers have many options to choose from if they’re not satisfied with their current provider. And because it
costs much more to gain new customers than it does to retain existing ones, mobile service providers are heavily prioritizing programs to build customer loyalty.
However, building that loyalty requires a dramatic enhancement of the customer experience (CX). A mass-market approach to promotions can be perceived as nothing more than spam, causing as much
negative reaction as an interruption in mobile service. Obviously, providers need to do more than blanket a generic message on all their customers or simply react to issues that affect service —
they need to proactively and positively manage their interaction with those customers in order to become a trusted partner and adviser.
How can they do that? By understanding each individual customer and personalizing service to his or her life, interests and current situation. Using location- and context-sensitive customer
information, service providers can make real-time decisions and deliver high value to customers, enhancing all aspects of the mobile experience.
It’s a tall order, but the key technology needed to achieve this sort of personalized, real-time decision making for improving CX is a Fast Data solution such as VMware’s GemFire, an in-memory
data grid (IMDG) that distributes and stores large amounts of data across multiple server nodes at faster speeds than those of traditional databases.
In the case of GemFire, 40 times faster, and on low-cost x86 nodes across data centers worldwide — with zero points of failure. As the need increases for service providers to capture more and
more customer information, GemFire’s ability to rapidly digest and back up large amounts of data while guaranteeing that none of it is lost makes it ideal for mobile network data.
