Avoiding Data Commoditization: The Need for Smarter Customer Engagement

The Opportunity

Operators have an opportunity to develop deeper relationships with their customers through smarter engagement and increase the relevance of the operator to the customer. This can drive trust, loyalty, upsell opportunities and profitability. However, in order to do this, operators need to provide engagement that is personalized, timely and relevant—otherwise customers will not re-act as they will see it as generic and irrelevant marketing communications.

Having real-time visibility on a customer’s behavior, provides real-time business intelligence and operators can use this intelligence as a trigger to drive a personalized engagement— everything from a CRM message to a specific upsell of a new offer. (including those from content and other service provider partners). The systems to develop, launch and monetize these new offers need to be part of an engagement solution. As operators roll out many new offers, they will need systems in place to enable rapid product development, launch and monetization. The advances in network functions virtualization are enabling these systems to be quickly installed with reduced opex and capex, thus providing operators with a more agile operating environment and processes.

By understanding customers, engaging with them, and providing value-based offers that are context sensitive, operators can evolve to providing more than just ‘data’ and avoid the risk of their core business becoming a price-based commodity.