delivering more personalized experiences to customers. They must drive personalization across the different, appropriate channels; analyze and improve customer-facing processes and touchpoints to create a solid foundation for starting an organization's personalization journey; build or utilize a digital personalization engine for commerce to best personalize digital customer experiences, deploy and monitor metrics for personalization; and work to continually improve customers' experiences.

The holistic approach

In part, all of this drives the need for a new, holistic approach to brand loyalty. Loyalty today means understanding your customers’ worldview and motivations, so communications are effective rather than routine. The road to success is paved by four steps. (See Figure 1 on previous page).

First, compete on journeys via consistent, contextual, and real-time personalized experiences across a wide range of touchpoints. Second, be data-led, developing actionable customer profiles informed by multidimensional data points like behavioral, predictive, attitudinal, and needs-based wants. Third, make personalization meaningful, creating a more anticipatory experience that guides behavior based on established interests. And fourth, listen and respond. Define planned and signal-based actions that respond to changing and complex individual customer needs. Dynamic customer engagement is, unavoidably, the new black.

Figure 2: Unique mix of marketing and digital capabilities
click to enlarge

Data-driven customer engagement, however, requires a distinctive and unique set of capabilities (see figure 2). These lie in the area of personalization, fueled by the use of both historic and real-time data mined from the network, from services, and from customer layers to build micro-segmented and relevant experiences. A new data foundation is critical, delivering a 360-degree, actionable customer profile built around multidimensional data attributes including behavioral insights, predictive analytics, and more. Analytics tools that identify patterns and preferences are increasingly critical to mitigate churn, define monetization opportunities, and add value beyond the delivery of core products towards identifying cross-selling opportunities. And then there’s gamification, a powerful tool that’s increasingly proven to deepen customer relationships, improve advocacy and upgrade net promoter score.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing

It’s clear with the benefit of hindsight that the year 2020 became, however reluctantly, a watershed year for telco marketing strategy. A fundamental shift that will echo increasingly over the coming years. It’s also clear as we move into 2021 that high performance in the digital era is reliant on a strong data foundation and the adoption of a lifecycle approach to customer engagement. The bywords for success and things to focus on now include prioritizing attractive onboarding, triggered campaigns, deep analytics, cross-channel selling, reactivation, and more. What are you doing in these areas? The answer to that question will define your future success.