“Many studies have shown that customer churn can significantly impact a bank’s revenue. According to a study, a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25-95% increase in profits. On the other hand, customer churn can result in losing their current and future business and a likelihood of negative word-of-mouth for the bank.”

While it is difficult to provide an exact figure for the revenue that retail banks lose due to customer churn, it is clear that customer retention is a key factor in maintaining a healthy revenue stream. Banks can mitigate churn by improving customer experience, providing competitive products and services, and implementing effective customer retention strategies. According to some estimates, the cost of customer churn can be as high as 5-10 times the cost of retaining an existing customer. A new-age customer engagement solution will play a crucial role for the banks.

Banks are trying to up their game by modernising their tech stack and infrastructure and adding skilful resources. DBS Bank in Singapore has invested heavily in digital transformation and data analytics to enhance customer experience. HDFC Bank in India has been using advanced analytics and AI-powered solutions to improve customer experience and retention. They have implemented initiatives such as chatbots, voice assistants, and personalised marketing campaigns to engage customers better. Ecobank has implemented initiatives such as mobile banking and digital wallets to provide customers with convenient banking services. Banks also expect increased participation from their tech vendors, such as campaign management and CRM vendors, to help them achieve their business goals.

“Equity Bank and Mastercard in Africa: Equity Bank, a Kenyan bank, partnered with Mastercard to launch a virtual prepaid card that allows customers to make online purchases and pay bills without going to a physical bank. 

Ecobank and Microsoft in Africa: Ecobank, a pan-African bank, partnered with Microsoft to launch a mobile banking app that allows customers to check their balances, transfer funds, and pay bills using their mobile phones”.

As we speak of these innovation projects, one solution that is at the core of all this is a campaign management solution. It directly affects the bank’s value creation chain as it is responsible for customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. So, the decision to invest in such as solution should be a thoughtful one. Hence, we have created this checklist for your as CMO or Head of Marketing at a bank to look for when you plan to invest in a customer engagement solution.

12 critical capabilities that retail banks need to look out for when investing in a campaign management solution. Does your CVM tick all the points?

 Hyper-personalisation: Banks need a contextual campaign management solution that can personalise messaging to individual customers based on their behaviour and preferences.

Multi-channel support: The solution must be able to manage campaigns across multiple channels, including email, mobile, social media, and website.

Real-time capabilities: Banks require real-time campaign management to respond to customer behaviour as it happens.

Segmentation and targeting: The solution must be able to segment customers based on demographics, behaviour, and other factors and target them with relevant campaigns.

Lead Management: The system should be capable of identifying high-value prospect interaction across channels to ensure a high conversion funnel. mViva can help you exactly with that, and also you can directly push prospects into different journeys from the funnel stages based on their interactions and lead score.

Purpose-driven customer journeys: The solution must enable value-driven customer interactions based on the customer’s purpose, intent and needs rather than just being action driven.

Automation and workflows: Banks need a solution to automate campaign workflows and make it easy for marketers to create and manage campaigns.

Real-time analytics and reporting: The solution must have robust analytics and reporting capabilities to track campaign performance and identify areas for improvement.

Integration with existing and new systems: Banks need a solution to integrate with their existing systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and data analytics platforms.

Scalability: The solution must handle large volumes of data and campaigns as the bank grows.

Security and compliance: Banks require a secure and compliant solution with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Ease of use: The solution must be user-friendly and intuitive, allowing marketers to easily create and manage campaigns without extensive technical knowledge.

mViva Customer Engagement Hub offers retail banks all the digital capabilities to provide an integrated experience to their end customers based on purpose-driven customer journeys. The advanced analytics module provides a 360-degree customer profile to execute a segment of one marketing. Banks can offer highly personalised, contextual, and relevant offers in real time, ensuring a high uptake rate.

Re-imagine your customer engagement with mViva. 

Talk to our subject matter experts today

The spray-and-pray method worked fine during the initial days of digitalization, but it has drastically changed with the advent of big data and AI/ML technologies. Customers demand contextual personalisation and companies want to make it a business priority. It is significant to note, that companies that excel at personalisation generate 40% more revenue than average players.

Today, leading telcos have turned to context-driven personalisation that utilises real-time data and insights to cater to the customer’s current and latent needs with the use of advanced analytics, machine learning, and data management tools.

Dynamic and evolving customers demand contextual and relevant interactions

While earlier customers may have expected basic services such as call quality or network range to be a benchmark, this has changed drastically over the years with a significant paradigm shift happening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being locked down and stuck indoors, customer expectations have continued to evolve and set ever higher benchmarks with a majority now considering experience to be just as important as products and services.

While we briefly touched upon the transition to context-driven personalisation, there are a couple of specific examples of how companies have evolved with changing customer demands and reinforcing their engagement strategy to ensure they are contextual and relevant.

In Europe, for example, certain operators have been able to develop a next-best-action churn model. This provided them with the ability to measure each customer’s likelihood to leave for a competitor in addition to grading the reasons behind churn. This analysis for customer churn, therefore, helped the operator to create campaigns on a micro-segment level and ensure highly personalised, contextual, and relevant interactions to address specific pain points with particular customers.

Another approach is telecoms that use network optimization techniques and real-time data to identify any potential network issues and preemptively resolve them to avoid any impact on the customer. Take for example a customer who is regularly experiencing slow mobile internet speeds, the operator can use network optimization techniques and tools to identify the issue, find the reason behind it and resolve the pain point resulting in better customer experience in addition to reducing support costs.

Moving from telco-specific services to a more digital services business model by integrating industry-agnostic offerings.

As technology becomes a more standardized approach across the telecommunication industry, the differentiation comes from how efficiently one can utilize it and offer better services through those technologies. Moving away from a telco-only specific model to a more comprehensive digital services portfolio model by integrating with other industries allowed telcos to offer an upgraded value to their customers.

Telecos may also have to reassess their business models, backend processes, and customer care support but when executed efficiently and at scale, these services can be a game-changer. The integration of newer services and products would require telcos to be customer obsessed and aim to drive value by creating a digital ecosystem that offers personalized avatars of the customer journey. Rakuten in Japan is the best example of how an e-commerce giant is revolutionizing the telecom space.

A company may choose to approach this by tracing the customer journey to truly understand their preferences to provide their customer with a differentiated digital experience via a range of digital services, which in turn enhances customer lifetime value. From payment services to music, advertisements and partnerships with other businesses – telcos must aim to pose a unique value proposition by giving their customers an exclusive omnichannel and holistic digital experience. The advent of 5G will further empower telcos in their drive to comprehensively personalise customer journeys, thanks to the inherent advantages of the technology. Benefits such as faster speeds, more reliable connections, increased capacity, and improved analytics, will also enable newer applications such as the use of augmented reality or virtual reality for a more personalised experience for each user.

In essence, with time and appropriate resources, telcos can be a lot like SaaS companies and provide integrated systems that can expand their service portfolios and revenue streams.

Changing the Customer Engagement Process

Without a doubt, there are multiple case studies on the internet (successful and otherwise) showcasing companies starting their digitalization journey by making huge investments in marketing technology. It is imperative to note that with martech, there is hardly ever a one-size-fits-all solution, and the focus should be on drawing value from the technology being adopted.

There are multiple ways to look at this and strategy will likely differ from one company to the next. Some telcos may prefer to adopt new technologies as greenfield projects, i.e., they choose not to digitize legacy systems yet. However, the telcos that have successfully implemented these technologies were able to integrate various distribution channels and avoid data siloes. This would range from accruing data from external and internal channels to providing a holistic picture of the customer with the ability to act on behaviours and needs, thereby personalizing the engagement and touchpoints to customers.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Customer Engagement

Maximizing value from the adoption of new technologies while controlling costs or investments is crucial. The implementation of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are already on the rise by telecommunication companies and have proven to be game-changers. This AI/ML-powered revolution can be seen in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants, personalised marketing via better customer data analysis and customer segmentation, predictive maintenance to reduce disruption to customers, and fraud detection to improve the security of systems. Various large global telecom companies such as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and Orange have implemented these novel AI/ML-enabled technologies to bring about a paradigm shift in customer engagement.

While many are aware of the implementation of these technologies in the digital customer journey to enhance experience and engagement, it is interesting to note that AI and ML can also be used in the retail/store setting to remove bottlenecks. In addition, these technologies allow for the integration of the ‘digital’ aspects of the company with physical stores and this is combined with personalized advertisements and targeted offers that reach the customer at the right time and when it is most relevant!

Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning technologies are now being used by telecommunication operators to create holistic customer profiles. Furthermore, these operators are now able to automate tedious and repetitive tasks and thereby reduce the burden on their teams while allowing more time for innovation and brainstorming.

For example, Reliance Jio uses AI, predictive analytics and big data to create real-time profiles of its 300+ million users. This gives the operator a better understanding of the market and helped it outperform competitors.

Another large telecom operator, Airtel, in India essentially created a new revenue stream by launching an advertisement service that leveraged its data science expertise and customer data. This operator ran targeted and uber-relevant advertisements from across industries including FMCG, BFSI, Automotive etc. These are some examples of how personalisation can offer new business opportunities to telcos.

Ensuring that the customer’s journey is managed and that the contextual marketing experience is on-point, can go a long way in altering the customer engagement process resulting in greater customer loyalty, enhanced brand power, greater customer retention, higher customer activation, enlarged range of revenue streams and a higher average revenue per user. To get a better understanding of how to elevate your marketing campaign’s performance, check this article here, which showcases the use of emerging technologies like AI/ML to maximize value.

• According to McKinsey Global Institute, AI and Machine Learning are on track to generate between $1.4 to $2.6 Trillion in value by solving Marketing and Sales problems over the next few years.
• According to Salesforce Research’s most recent state of Marketing Study, the AI application in Marketing jumped to 84% in 2020 from just 29% in 2018.
• According to Drift’s 202 Marketing Leadership Benchmark report, AI, Machine Learning, marketing & advertising technologies, voice/chat/digital assistants, and mobile tech & apps will have the biggest impact on the future of marketing.

Telecom marketing, as covered in one of our old blogs, requires in-depth insights into customer behaviour. The AI-ML capability helps campaign managers design and execute highly relevant and contextual campaigns and improves the campaign uptake rate, ARPU, retention and CLV.

How AI/ML is making Contextual Marketing in Telecom more dynamic, agile and customer-centric.

1. Helps in understanding the Customer’s Intent
2. Enable Multi-dimensional Customer Profiling
3. Let’s deep dive into the Customer Journey
4. Provide Intelligent Insights/Customer Analytics

mViva- the AI/ML driven Customer Engagement Hub

Pelatro tries to follow a guideline that Analytics’ integration in mViva mesh well and unobtrusively with the client’s business-oriented perspective – these include the ability to design campaign experiments by creating different configurations of target groups, methods to sample out control groups, various statistical KPIs, preferred channel identification etc.

In addition to the above, the mViva platform can also ingest certain types of models that can then be used to make predictions. The model output can then be used in campaigning like any other KPI.

mViva also includes other modules that are more obviously AI/ML. These include a Next Best Offer module that can choose the offer that will best align to a stated and configurable business strategy; a Customer Lifetime Value model that can be used for targeting subscribers appropriately; an Analytics Workbench that has been designed to help citizen data scientists build and deploy their own models; additional segmentation methods such as RFM analysis and Segment Shattering which permit users to automatically break down and describe larger segments so that they can be targeted differently.

Want to know more about the AI/ML capabilities of mViva Customer Engagement Hub?

Click Here (Link to Contact Us) or write to us at hello@pelatro.com.

But why should you listen to us on this subject? Good point!

To give you a snapshot of Pelatro, we have almost three decades of telecommunications experience. Our customer engagement solution is used by various operators across the globe and processes over 1 billion subscribers’ data. So, we have some authority over the subject matter.

Now let’s get back to the problem at hand. How to find the right campaign management solution that fits your requirements.

Here is an 8-step process to help you find the best solution.

Setting the objectives

Setting up the goals and objectives will help you clarify what you need to get to targets. When you plan to invest millions of dollars in any solution, you need to know what you plan to achieve with that solution. It can be as simple as reducing churn by 30% or improving the customer experience score.

Understanding the organization and market maturity

Why is this important, you may ask? Imagine investing in a best of the breed solution with all the AI/ML capabilities, advanced analytics, fully automated and real-time decisioning, generates hundreds of reports each day, and can cater to any digital ecosystem? Suppose you have invested a few million dollars in this solution, but later, you realize you could have achieved the same or better results with fewer capabilities. Imagine the challenges when you try to integrate it with existing legacy infrastructure? Not so much of a smooth ride, right! We have seen organizations going after the AI/ML buzz, but you need to reassess your requirements before committing to such heavy investments. You should definitely look for scalable solutions but not at the cost of present requirements.

Solution Capabilities

Map your requirements with the solution capabilities and see how efficiently you can achieve them. This is a smart way to assess the capabilities you exactly need to address your business challenges. The important thing here is to not only invest based on current challenges but what you will face in the next 2 to 3 years and see if the solution is futuristic and scalable.

Synergies between the operator and the vendor

Often a neglected area, but it is critical. Digitalization has led to the growth of ecosystem driven business models where different stakeholders across the value chain come together to create a unified and complete experience for the end customer. And if you and your ecosystem partner (i.e.) your vendor are not aligned on this, it can lead to a broken experience for your consumers.

Integration with your existing systems

Telcos most of them, if not all, are built and run on heavily invested legacy infrastructure. Hence, it becomes crucial that whatever new solution you invest in can integrate with the legacy infrastructure and still deliver the best results for traditional and digital services. Not only this, but it should also be futuristic and scalable to support the digital ecosystem and help you grow. Some basic things to look for are API driven microservice architecture that allows the creation of a more flexible digital architecture. Also, be mindful of the time requirements from project kick-off to going live.

Look for success stories/References

References are a great way to assess if a solution/vendor is the right fit for your business. Vendors working with operators of your scale, maturity and operating in a similar market can be potential partners, but you obviously need to analyze the vendors on other parameters specific to your business.

Budget

Do a careful market analysis of available vendors. See what kind of operating model (OPEX or CAPEX) you would like to invest in. Most traditional operators prefer the CAPEX model because they are used to it. But the new age, digitally-driven telcos are moving towards the OPEX model as it gives them agility and flexibility to experiment at pace and scale, and also, you are not shelling out a large chunk of money initially. CAPEX model makes changing the course and agility unfeasible. Also, the competitive market driven by digital natives is shifting the choices that telcos had in the past.

Why choose Pelatro over other vendors?

Pelatro has successfully enabled 22 telecom operators across the globe to drive their customer engagement with mViva Customer Engagement Hub. The platform is a one-stop solution that helps with in-depth customer analysis and offers real-time hyper-personalized campaigns with the segment of one targeting at scale. The company’s key strengths include deep domain expertise to assist telcos with data analysis and campaign design through big data capabilities enabled by AI and ML techniques and managed services. The platform can suit the need of any operator of any size (we have customers from a few million subscribers to 400+ million subscribers).

Interested to know more about mViva Customer Engagement Hub? Click Here

Amazon gets almost 35% of its revenue by engaging its customers through a recommendation engine. Netflix recommendation engine also generates over USD 1 billion per year in revenue. Many businesses have scaled their customer engagement to new heights that transformed into business benefits. But we do not hear a similar success story in telecommunication. Why is it so?

Despite access to the largest pool of customer data compared to any other industry, Telcos tend to be unsuccessful in capitalising on it to enhance customer engagement.

They struggle with low engagement, depleting revenues, and high churn. There have been investments in customer engagement solutions, techniques, talents and strategy, yet there seems to be no end to their misery. So, what is stopping telcos from becoming customer-centric and meeting the dynamic digital-first customer demands?

Where telcos missed taking the right turn

Unlike the digital natives, Telcos found it difficult to phase out the traditional approach as they are heavily invested in legacy systems and traditional processes, so it becomes difficult to break the chain. There have been some progressive investments in data lakes, enterprise-grade software, new age OSS/BSS, but customer-centricity still lacks the required focus. To achieve this transformation, there is a need to bring in a customer-centric solution like customer engagement hubs. Telcos are still using multiple poorly integrated systems to perform a task end-to-end. Telcos use different solutions for customer analytics, campaign planning, campaign intelligence, NBO. Lack of data sharing and reconciling capabilities among these systems lead to the half-baked output. Also, the time lost in the lengthy process delays decision making and poorly designed campaigns. Today’s customers are impatient, demanding and want a holistic, integrated experience specially designed to suit them. Achieving this is not impossible, but telcos need to plan and act accordingly.

Why telcos must invest in the right customer engagement hub

A Customer Engagement Hub is an important element to strengthen the value chain that can transform the telco-customer relationship and directly impact the bottom line. Gartner defines Customer Engagement Hub as an architectural framework that optimally ties multiple systems together to engage the customer. It allows personalised, contextual customer engagement across all interaction channels, whether through a human, artificial agent, or sensors. It helps create an integrated customer experience by connecting multiple siloed functions for a seamless experience.

Customer engagement hubs help fulfil customers’ demand for more personalised, seamless experiences. Customers demand an integrated, seamless experience as they switch between different channels during the purchase journey.

Salesforce’s recent research shows that 75% of customers expect seamless interactions across different departments. 54% of respondents say sales, service, and marketing don’t seem to share information; 83% of customers expect immediate resolution when they contact a business.

As per Mckinsey, operators that have advanced their digital customer engagement will experience the most significant upside.

How to check if your customer engagement hub is the right fit for you

In today’s context, the most important thing is to offer an end-to-end capability for telcos to manage the entire customer engagement from one platform. This reduces operational cost; centralised data access minimises the time for analysis; enable real-time decisioning. Cost-benefit and reduce operational overheads as the operator is just managing a single vendor. Advanced self-servicing AI/ML-driven capabilities to allow business teams to run the platform without any dependency on the technical teams. This is a great capability to promote the citizen data scientist model to create a data-driven organisational culture. Real-time decisioning and execution help telcos in highly personalised, contextual and value-driven interaction with customers.

Easy integration with different systems (upstream and downstream) through APIs. This enables easy data sharing and has a single view of the entire organisation. You can collate diverse customer data points to create a 360-degree customer profile to help you run a segment of one campaign.

Here is a case study of a leading telecom operator that saw significant revenue impact and churn reduction by migrating their legacy systems to Pelatro’s MViva Customer Engagement Hub.

About Pelatro’s MViva Customer Engagement hub

Pelatro mViva Customer Engagement Hub offers an end-to-end solution that creates a foundation for delivering a better, more informed customer engagement experience. It provides clear visibility into the customer’s entire relationship with the telecom operators and enables the marketing teams to be more effective. You can engage the customers at a more holistic level, considering their past interactions, behaviours, needs, and other aspects.

Interested to see a demo of mViva Customer Engagement Hub? Click Here

Product innovation has long been the key focus for telcos to entice new customers, engage the current ones and bring in the additional revenue to keep the growth momentum going. But it has run its course with the democratization of technology, and there is a dire need to shift the focus now to other growth providing areas. The telecommunication industry is not known for its customer-first nature, but as customers become more digital savvy, that notion is changing. In fact, improving the customer experience is one of the top strategic priorities for telecom operators.

As other telco starts offering similar products, product innovation will no longer bring in the required business growth. Customer experience is one area where telcos try to set themselves apart from the competition. It can help them improve the subscriber acquisition, enhance subscriber engagement, reduce the churn and eventually acquire a larger market share.

Innovating customer experience can help telcos gain the upper edge

Customers want to see value in every interaction with the service provider. They expect telecom operators to understand their needs and wants, what they like and serve them as an individual and not as part of a group. Telcos need to increase the perceived value of every interaction with their subscribers that translates into higher ROI for both. Customer experience has been intertwined with every other function across every customer touchpoint. Improving customer experience can help telcos significantly improve brand loyalty, reduce the propensity to switch to a competitor and increase the CLV.

Contextual marketing to deliver the innovation in customer experience

Knowing what your customers want is not enough; knowing the context is crucial. If you are not able to deliver the right offer when they need one, it holds no value later. Therefore, telcos need to create a value exchange in every interaction with their subscribers by shifting from product-centric campaigns to value-based campaigns that are contextual and real-time. A comprehensive campaign management solution with the ability to plan and execute contextual campaigns can help them deliver these value-driven customer interactions.

Many vendors are developing innovative features in their contextual campaign management solutions with real-time data ingestion and analytical capabilities for real-time and contextually relevant interactions. It can enable telecom operators to focus on individuals rather than on a segment with a hyper-personalized approach. And dynamic content optimization can provide fine-tuned offers and promotions that can positively impact customer experience. Rather than just another sale, contextual marketing can make customers feel important and valued, leading to increased trust and stronger

brand loyalty.

Replace product-centric campaigns with value-based exchange with customers 

The evolving consumer behaviour has shifted the telco mindset about engaging with their customers. This has made the role of a marketer more exciting and complex at the same time. Value exchange means designing your offers or promotions as per the needs and wants of the customers. Value exchange campaigns combined with context and run in real-time can deliver the best experience and RoI.

A subscriber with higher data usage and inclination towards sports events can be offered customized data bundles before an upcoming sports event. This contextual interaction or value-based exchange increases your campaign success, leading to a positive customer experience and higher revenue. Your traditional upsell, cross-sell, or acquisition campaigns will always exist, but the value will come from contextually orchestrated relevant interactions to address your customer expectations, and that’s the innovation we are talking about.

“Marketing

is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”- Peter Drucker

The responsibility lies on the marketer’s shoulder. They are the guiding light in the sea of offers, packages and plans. As customers move towards a more digital experience, marketers need to look for avenues to create a better customer experience. Marketers have multiple tools at their disposal to help them create an experience for their customers that no one can replicate.

Is your campaign management solution helping you innovate your customer

experience? 

As we mentioned earlier, vendors are building new capabilities in the campaign management solution to help telcos with real-time decision making. A solution that can help you with contextually relevant and real-time interactions with your customers based on in-depth data analysis will go a long way to improve your campaign efficiency and outcomes. Having a 360-degree view at the subscriber level helps you understand their usage pattern, behaviour and plan N=1 or segment of one level campaigns. Many OTT or eCommerce companies use DCO or dynamic creative (or content) optimization to place creative/content based on customers’ historical data and behaviour analysis to prompt viewers to take action. An advanced Campaign management solution enabled with artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities can power marketers to plan and promote offers with higher uptake in real-time.

Learn about mViva Contextual Customer Engagement hub.

Personalisation can only be achieved when you have a complete understanding of each of your subscribers and send them relevant offers or plans. Telcos switched from mass marketing to break subscribers into broad segments based on certain parameters. That seemed to work for some time. But as the subscribers evolved into digital-first customers, the broad segmentation is no more useful. A survey found that 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.

Micro-Segmentation: key to personalization

Micro-segmentation is a way to divide broad customer segments into smaller, more homogenous small segments with similar behavioural and psychographic traits. Micro-segmentation has evolved over time with solutions that support precision marketing techniques where the segment size could be the “Segment of one” or “n=1”, where you target every individual with an offer tailored to their needs.

Each micro-segment has an intent, or an objective based on the campaign manager’s need, and it varies depending upon the micro-segment’s dominant behaviour. Let’s understand with an example here. Say intent for Segment A could be ‘upsell of packs’ as they are already on a pack, and the intent for segment B could be to reduce churn as the segment show low engagement and have a high churn score.

Micro-segmentation helps the marketer understand the subscriber behaviour even before targeting. The marketer understands their needs and addresses it directly basis the segment intent rather than the ‘one size fits all’ approach. This improves the campaign performance, resulting in higher take rates and better ROI.

Slice and dice customer data for micro-segmentation

Every marketer understands the importance of creating a micro-segment for personalised campaigns. But, breaking down a large segment base into small homogenous micro-segments is not easy. You need to obtain in-depth, highly indexing attributes for each base segment.   These highly indexing variables can be identified through segment analytics. It allows for a more holistic understanding of each base segment and identifies the potential characteristics to create micro-segments.

Slice and dice help analyse the broader audience group by breaking them into micro-segments. To arrive at the micro-segments, individual subscribers are clustered using key attributes that express the homogenous behaviour. It gives a holistic view by distinguishing the customer base into different groups to identify the good, average, and best performing segments. Once the user identifies a particular segment, each segment can further be drilled down using defined attributes to arrive at an intent or objective to launch campaigns for the microsegment.

Once the micro-segment and the intent for the campaign are identified, pilot campaigns are executed to measure the micro-segment and offer efficacy. The best micro-segments, along with the best performing offers, are broad-based to evaluate the campaigns and KPI’s basis the campaign intent. Here are some of the attributes that can be used to create micro-segments:

1. Geographic
2. Demographic
3. Psychographic
4. Behavioural
5. Product based
6. Benefit based
7. Volume/usage based

How mViva can help micro-segment subscribers for better targeting and campaign performance

Micro-segmentation is an important capability for any campaign management solution to allow marketers to plan and execute highly targeted campaigns. Pelatro’s mViva, an advanced marketing platform, uses two different methodologies to microsegment the larger segments.

      1. Slice and Dice:

Users can select KPIs/Attributes for micro-segmentation, perform the base analysis on the platform, run pilot campaigns, and extend the best campaigns to micro-segments.

      2. Segment Shatter:

Automatic identification of segments or clusters based on AI-ML technologies, Hierarchical Clustering and Neural Networks.

Want to know more about Micro-Segmentation and how we are helping our customers with better targeting, contact us. 

“Thanks for being a loyal customer! You have an unused balance of XXX loyalty points in your account. Use YYY points from those and get 10% discount in Walmart for purchase of up to ZZZ!”

Keeping this offer in mind, there is a pretty good chance that this subscriber will take advantage of the suggestion that he just received on his phone. The same customer could also think about saving some money on other similar purchases and might check out your other latest recharge plans to avail applicable discounts or cashback. But only if he receives the offer at the right time.

Though many Telcos have applied robust marketing strategies in the past, the need for campaigns to become more relevant and contextualized has become very evident during the COVID-19 outbreak. Over the last few months, internet connectivity has become the lifeforce of global businesses, thereby fueling higher data consumption. Here are some of the key findings to corroborate the truth about data usage during COVID-19 lockdown.

Key Findings:

●       As per the digital consumer survey conducted by EY, nearly 11 percent of the basic data users upgraded their existing packs to either unlimited or 50-100 percent higher data to address their content streaming, gaming, and video calling requirements.

●       According to the same survey, there was 11GB data consumption per user per month, a 30 percent spike in usage, pushing data consumption to two to three years into the future. The survey further revealed that nearly 33% of survey respondents upgraded broadband plans to higher data packages with unlimited plans accounting for 40% of total upgrades.

●       Vodafone saw a rise in data consumption by 30% in the UK and 50% in some European countries during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Now, as a telecom operator, think about all the strategies you adopted to make an existing customer upgrade his/her plans. You made him/her aware of your brand, pocket-friendly offers, and conveyed why your plans are better than other telecom service providers. But during this lockdown, this customer stops buying plans from you and instead opts for your competitor’s plans despite all the efforts from your end. What might have gone wrong?

 Let’s explore the possible reasons.

The unpredictable shift in customer behavior and consumption patterns

As per research reports by a Frankfurt-based internet exchange, DE-CIX, data consumption on OTT, and video on demand (VoD) platforms shot up by 249% during March and April compared to February 2020. And, from March to July 18, this demand jumped to 947%.

 This radical change in data usage explains how people consumed more content from the internet through OTT sites, gaming sites, ECommerce, and video conferencing platforms. Some telecom operators even disabled high-quality video on OTT sites and optimized bandwidth usage to facilitate this growing demand. But, in most scenarios, most telecom operators didn’t reach their milestones in terms of engaging customers with the right action and offer at the right time and at the right place. In the coming months, data consumption patterns are going to remain the same or even rise further because people’s lives have now started to revolve around this new lifestyle, of work, and stay at home”.

For example, a particular member of the family who now seems to spend most of his/her time watching movies online might not even know that he/she can avail a free month subscription of Netflix towards the purchase of a particular data plan. And if he/she doesn’t receive the offer message at the right time, then the offer will cease to become somewhat irrelevant.

The decline in new customer acquisitions and fall in revenue per user

Despite the radical shift in data consumption, some might think that the coronavirus pandemic didn’t hit Telcos that hard, given the higher consumption of data across various platforms. But that’s not entirely the scene, and why? As per many industry reports, Telcos witnessed a sharp drop in people who came into stores to buy new SIM cards and connections. This has impacted many operators’ new 4g and 3g product additions in metros, towns, and cities were working, and commercial groups of people reside. Apart from the reduction of the number of footfalls, network tariff in many countries has surged, leading to the exit of many customers and prevented the entry of new ones.

Though the Telcos are busy enabling a smooth transition to simplify this recent change by offering less or free Talktime, data, and content services to customers, it might take some more time for them to bounce back from the plummeting revenue.

 How some of the major players in the telecom sector addressed these pain points?

Although the telecom industry is scrambling to tackle a host of challenges, many operators managed the crisis effectively and emerged stronger after the COVID-19 lockdown.

 Let’s understand how!

 Focus on the changing needs with faster response rate, relevant plans, and offers

What’s hard to comprehend, is the fact that many messages that subscribers received were not as per the activities they performed during the lockdown. Out of many offers and marketing messages that come in customers’ way, only a few become relevant. Faced with twin challenges of making the existing customers aware of new offers and acquiring the new ones, contextual marketing is now looked upon as one of the saviors by Telcos in these testing times. The key is to instantly attract the customer’s attention at the very start of their research and avoid missing out on engagement opportunities. By integrating customer’s data with analytics, Telcos are achieving ‘ultra-personalization’ for their subscriber base. They can now inform the subscriber about relevant plan upgrades or better-suited plans based on the customer’s need.

For example: If the customer exhausts his/her data before the stipulated data expiry plan while browsing on the internet, it might lead to his/her inconvenience. However, if he receives real-time triggers and notifications along with messages of data extension plans whenever the data threshold is attained, he/she can continue enjoying the uninterrupted service.

Whether the engagement is related to promotion or customer satisfaction, a reliable and substantial differentiator for the Telecom brand is to be able to proactively offer or recommend an adapted solution before the customer starts searching. And that’s when contextual marketing helps! It allows the carrier to resolve issues by reacting faster with the best solution or plan.

Building relentless customer support with real-time and relevant offers

Since it’s still uncertain whether the foot traffic in stores will increase or not in the foreseeable future, starting omnichannel customer-centric approaches can ensure that customers have the telecom operator’s required help and support. Even in the coming days, call centers will continue to receive humongous customer inquiries, and if not handled with the right action plan, customer exits will further shoot up. Telcos might decide on reallocating their marketing team’s priorities to support customer feedback/inquiries with appropriate and contextual solutions and offers.

Some of the major players in this sector have already deployed contextual management tools and chatbots to better understand and address customer needs and initiate real-time recommendations.

For example: Having a chatbot might help start a conversation with the customers while browsing the carrier’s site to pay bills or make purchases. The Telecom brand may also use the chatbot to redirect the engaged customers to a particular landing page or help center, where they can receive personalized assistance in real-time. The live engagement can build more trust among the customers and can serve as CTA and help redirect online customers to a product page (offers and plans) based on their requirements.

Introducing Empathy based services

As the tariffs of voice, as well as data packages, continue to soar, Telcos might consider introducing Empathy based offers to customers to manage higher pricing rates. For example, Telcos can introduce ‘internet booster packages’ designed for uninterrupted work from homes and, in parallel, inform those who work remotely with various messaging channels. They can also support their customers with late fees removal and payment flexibility options and provide one-on-one advice or offers to individuals who have bought new mobiles, broadband, or TV packages. By taking this small step, Telcos can regain the customers’ trust and build loyalty among them.

 New Opportunities in the ‘New Normal’

According to a report from Forrester Research, it costs five times as much to acquire new customers than it does to keep the existing ones. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, several Telcos tried to retain the lost customers by launching short-time promotional goals, and it did work effectively for some time. But the situation is quite different and challenging now. Telcos need to up their marketing game as they bear the massive pressure of investing in the right customer without dwindling the revenue. Though this pandemic has taken a toll on new customer sign-ups, there are many opportunities around, which could prove helpful in strengthening the existing customer base with contextual advertising.

As customers’ expectations continue to evolve at an unprecedented rate, Telcos need to gear up and play a key role in helping them sail through this crisis smoothly. Having said that, the telecom operators spearheading active customer engagement with an integrated focus across contextual campaigns will stay relevant and essential to customers during these challenging times and gain tremendous value during and beyond the recovery phase. Other telecom brands that are yet to build their contextual marketing strategy should ramp-up their marketing efforts or risk being left behind in the competition.

 Pelatro’s mViva contextual campaign management solution executes targeted individual campaigns and tailor-made offers to suit the customer’s behavior. We can help create and run real-time campaigns based on real-time triggers that allow the marketers to ensure that the campaign is most effective and contextual.

Connect with our experts here to know more.

Stay safe and stay relevant!

Let’s dig deeper into this blog and understand how contextual marketing and loyalty management are helping telcos enhance the customer lifetime value and generate higher revenue.

Understanding your customer behaviour and their preference 

Contextual Marketing and Loyalty Management solutions are centred around providing the optimum customer experience by using customer data and segmentation principles. This improves the cross-sell or upsell campaign outcomes, resulting in high customer uptake. Contextual campaign solution helps design hyper-personalised offers based on the context or relevance to the customer, and loyalty management rewards subscribers for their trust, usage, promptness, and age in the network.

Enabling customer segmentation for easy targeting 

Customer Lifetime Value allows easy segmentation on multiple parameters such as high CLV or Low CLV customers and engages them with a different strategy. Marketers can create a campaign strategy based on ascending ARPU and target customers at various junctures. Customers with a low CLV can be grouped and launch specific plans and offers to increase ARPU.

Customising hyper-personalised offers and plans

Telcos can use Clustering and Machine Learning techniques to design campaigns and make offers at the N=1 level. Segmentation and personalisation offer a sense of “gratification”, resulting in improved acceptance and uptake among subscribers.

Allow churn prevention and retention

Big data analytics and AI/ML have allowed deep insights into customer behaviour. Churn prediction models built using customer data offer inputs on a customer’s propensity to churn. This equips Marketing or Campaign Managers to design preventive offers for a longer relationship and better CLV.

Pelatro’s mViva Loyalty Management Solution has added a level of dynamism in Loyalty Management for a leading Telco. It has enabled Loyalty Management teams to identify potential churners and launch loyalty offers to a signed-up base of 13 million subscribers delivered across multi-channel/multi-language communication.

Optimising campaign costs and tuning campaigns

In today’s complex world with dynamic subscriber behaviours, real-time analytics plays a crucial role to help the Customer value management teams make timely and data-driven decisions. An interactive dashboard can provide a ringside view of the campaign performance allowing managers to intervene at critical junctures. New-age Contextual Marketing solutions with intuitive UI for slice and dice of data help optimise campaign costs and fine-tune campaigns for best results.

Rewarding loyal customers

Timely rewards to loyal customers help telcos nurture the relationship and add value to a customer. With the help of a Loyalty Management platform, rewards and offers can be designed and delivered by analysing preferences and behaviour. A capable Loyalty Management solution should also offer data monetisation opportunities through partnerships with online/offline retailers for exclusive offers.

Happy and satisfied customers often go the extra mile to promote their positive experience with the brand, the network, and services and create the necessary word of mouth.

Today, Customer Value Management (CVM) teams are made up of skilled and experienced resources. Dedicated teams are deployed to deliver high-value products and services at the subscriber level and thereby directly impacting Customer Journey.

There is an immediate need to tackle common “pain points” faced by Campaign Management teams. It is the time to give a lending ear to such problems and consider a one-point software solution that equips and empowers teams to deliver campaigns based on the “context” of each customer. This enables Telecom Marketers to play a prominent role in adding value to the Customer Journey at various junctures and touchpoints.

The infographic below illustrates the most common issues faced by Campaign Managers in the Telecom industry and how they can be equipped to counter the challenges.

There is an imminent need is to replace legacy, non-scalable interconnected systems with a one-stop Contextual Marketing solution capable of offering real-time customer insights for driving meaningful campaigns with definite outcomes.