Tying customer experience to revenue for telcos

Despite challenges, the overall outlook for the telco industry in 2013 is looking positive, according to Kamariah Mohamed Noor, GM Sales for Telco, T&T and Family Conglomerates at IBM Malaysia.

She also observed that fixed broadband will face growth while Long Term Evolution (LTE) or 4G will be the focus of telcos this year. “There is a lot of hype surrounding the roll out of 4G with every provider trying to offer the service as soon as possible.” Indeed, players and analysts alike say the industry will
continue to be competitive and challenging, with the Internet/data segment driving industry earnings growth.

“The overall telecommunications industry will continue to be more competitive and challenging, mainly due to increased competition in providing alternative communication medium channels (eg VoIP, messaging apps) due to industry convergence between telecommunications and multimedia, that is seeing more players move into IPTV (Internet Protocol television) and high-speed broadband, “ said Kamariah.

According to a recent report by The Star, the local market is reaching saturation in view of the high penetration rate, with mobile/cellular at a 137.7% population penetration rate and broadband with a 63.8% household penetration rate.

Telco’s tech top picks 
Solutions that provide insight into individuals beyond the standard CRM offerings , are among the top 3 on local telcos’ wishlists.

Kamariah explained, “Savvy customers are also demanding that service providers provide a seamless experience across all channels prompting the need for deeper insights on customer satisfaction and personalised user experience.

“By intelligently mining customer data using powerful analytics, service providers can proactively customise and tailor make products and services unique to the customer. For instance, brand loyalty largely depends on customer satisfaction.”

She also opined that social media data is being utilised to help telcos develop the right service and packages to serve their customers better.

“The trend is concurrent with IBM’s Smarter Planet agenda to leverage on instrumented technology that is interconnected to yield intelligent and useful data. “

That’s why IBM sees itself in the position to help telcos and even communication service providers  (CSPs) leverage the latters’ assets to explore new revenue streams. This is due to CSPs owning massive amounts of subscriber information. Kamariah said, “As their revenue needs become more urgent, CSPs are being compelled to move deeper into the arena of customer-centricity.

“Improving Customer Experience becomes a ‘very important’ priority; i.e. the experience that they provide to their subscribers by closely matching their subscribers’ needs and interests will help to create stickiness, resulting in increased revenue per subscriber and a reduced churn rate.”

Besides this, there is also the need to provide for third parties such as e-commerce providers and healthcare providers with similar needs around trust, privacy, and fraud prevention.

“As a client driven technology solution provider, IBM has the depth and breadth of services that telcos can leverage on to enable and facilitate them to tap into the value of building such highly personalised relationships with their customers securely,” said Kamariah.

 CSPs have three types of opportunities with IBM’s Mobile Enterprise Solutions, namely to use it themselves like any other enterprise that have a mobile workforce to manage, to resell IBM’s mobile enterprise solutions and make money by leveraging existing relationships with enterprises and managing their customers’ mobile requirements and last but not least, to develop mobile enterprise apps or adapt their partners’ apps for sale.

CSPs focused on strengthening their enterprise and government revenue are extending their businesses into helping enterprise subscribers ‘mobile-ise’ their businesses. For example, new service offerings include device management or mobile enablement of the subscribers’ applications.

“This is often placed in the context of a developer ecosystem cultivated by the carrier for the purpose of new service creation in concert with application-network API (Application Programming Interface) exposure. This is a revenue opportunity for our clients.” Kamariah pointed out.

Cloud building
According to the GM of sales, IBM also works with CSPs to build scalable, secure and robust infrastructure through cloud computing that will enable the CSPs to deploy new revenue generation initiatives (e.g. Mobile advertising, etc) with speed and agility at an efficient cost.

“Cloud computing is an enabling force behind our increasingly interconnected world. It is the “element” that will allow every interaction to become smarter and more connected, to the real world. It proves to be an important model for the delivery of business services that will transform IT purchasing, sourcing, and provisioning models over the next decade,” Kamariah concluded.