Leveraging Big Data to Improve the Customer Experience
Along with structured data for customer experience purposes, various unstructured data should also be collected from outside the service provider's systems. These sources include such things as Twitter feeds or Facebook updates—basically, any external source where customers indicate whether they like or dislike their services or whether there is a problem. In many cases, these data sources provide some of the greatest insight into the customer’s mood and psyche—and thus can be some of the most useful in making course corrections, changes, or updates to services.
Taken together, a big data strategy that looks at all relevant data sources and then parses data based on specific business fields, importance, real time behavior changes, and/or risk characteristics will give the service provider the ability to make more proactive decisions for its business. We must not forget, however, the human element in all of this strategy. The roadmap for a proactive customer experience doesn’t come unless technology (which could be big-data specific or based on system consolidation or digital transformation goals) AND organizational strategies are in place. That roadmap must be built into daily operations at every level of the organization. In other words, CSPs must align the appropriate internal resources with their analytical skills and ensure each relevant business area feeds into the larger data management strategy.
Across today’s telecom landscape, the market leaders are the ones who have integrated analytics into everyday discussions that reach from the leading edges of the web to deep inside the billing system. CSPs must build on the insights—into segment needs, product preferences, communication performance and more—that they gain from a holistic customer experience management plan and be willing to adapt procedures based on them. Only by aligning people's long-term goals with an overarching customer experience management process that unites systems and processes will the CSP be able to reap the maximum benefits of the data that can ultimately keep the customer happy.
