With providing an excellent experience increasingly at the top of service providers' agendas, one of the most important challenges lies in determining exactly what customers want, and then ensuring that they as the service provider can deliver what the customer wants at the right time and in the customer's channel of choice.

Service providers already have access to a wide range of first-party data from their own systems, but for a fully contextual, 360-degree view of the customer, CSPs first need to extract actionable insights from that data, and then combine it with actionable third-party data from social media and other sources. The result can be a more comprehensive, multi-dimensional view of the customer’s behavior — both online and offline. It can also allow the service provider to track the customer relationship for longer periods of time, and reveal patterns of how customer behavior changes over time so that the service provider can deliver better service and improve cross-sell and upsell opportunities during the entire relationship with the customer.

Continuous Improvement

AI-powered solutions improve as their exposure to data sources increases, which in turn enhances data intelligence  — a virtuous circle in action. This, in turn, informs and guides the processes that optimize the customer experience, while simultaneously making the interaction as effective and efficient as possible. The other crucial factor, however, is data quality. Since insights are only as good as the information from which they are sourced, the data sources need to be:

• Fresh—act as it happens
• Clean—prevent the garbage-in, garbage-out phenomenon
• Complete—partial data leads to poor decision making

Data-fueled AI Impacts All Aspects of Operations

AI can have a positive impact on service provider operations across the spectrum. AI can take network optimization to new levels, bringing advanced intelligence to data analytics while making customer-facing operations and services more effective than ever before. The latter includes personalized plans and service bundles, more interactive marketing engagement, and proactive, efficient customer-care operations. 

Marketing engagement

Understanding user behavior enables service providers, through AI, to create personalized customer engagements for each customer, creating offers and messages that are contextual and done in real time across a wide range of criteria, including personalized pricing plans, service bundles, and marketing messages. Personalized, real-time sales and marketing offers play a central role in service providers’ (data) monetization strategies as well as enhancing the value of customers' engagements and improving customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS).

Customer care

AI has a huge role to play in improving the quality of the customer experience and therefore the quality of service. Service providers' strategies to monetize data are dependent on high levels of programmable intelligence and automation to handle the exponential increase in traffic and the onboarding of new devices and subscribers, along with the processing and actioning of personalized customer care responses. 

The intelligence-driven product catalog

AI solutions can leverage customer engagement data to automatically fine-tune the product catalog offerings.