Yet research says those transformation efforts fail most of the time. Why? Perhaps there are many reasons: strategic mistakes with goal setting, tactical flaws in planning, operational errors during execution. In this article, I shall narrow down these issues, those that are largely in our control, and suggest a few ways to overcome them.
1. Don’t let FOMO be the driver.
Put your horse before the cart. A competing bank’s marketing campaign focused on NFT-backed digital artifacts for loyalty exerts a lot of pressure on all peers. But before onboarding a vendor to provide the backbone for crypto assets, the marketing team should list a handful of concrete use cases and assess their relevance/appeal to the bank’s customer base.
For instance, create a concrete use case like this:
“My Telco X shall mint 1,000 celebrity-signed SIMs accompanied by a collectible, say a coffee mug or watch, and distribute it to our most loyal customers. The SIM and the collectible are digitally coupled and tokenized using NFTs, making this a limited-count asset now. Customers (may) take pride in owning it. We may incite demand as the asset is limited. We may host an exclusive “Celebrity Collectible Owners Club” with the access key being the NFT itself.”
And if it sounds logical, then onboard a partner to realize the vision.
2. Remove self-imposed constraints.
Most enterprises lock themselves in with only one vendor for a specific function and let them handle the entire customer base. For instance, one vendor for CCCM, one for RTIM, one for digital analytics, etc. And each one of them caters to the whole base of 100 million customers.
Enterprises seek advanced capabilities like A/B testing from those products but do not themselves practice A/B testing with multiple vendors, where, say, two competitor products are pitted against half the customer base.
In today’s contemporary tech landscape, with most vendors taking the SaaS route, operational considerations of yesteryears should not be held as blockers for having multiple incumbent competing products.
3. Diffuse the tension between IT and business.
A common trait I find in market leaders is the presence of absolute synergy between IT and business. Meanwhile, I notice the opposite in laggards. But both are wrong and need a realignment in order to put the end customers ahead of their own priorities.
Having IT and business aligned on the right “customer” axis is pivotal to ensuring smooth and successful outcomes.
4. Don’t go for blind AI; seek explanations.
It is sad but true that even large enterprises fall prey to machine learning’s (ML) glamour and onboard many AI-heavy projects, allowing their systems to make a lot of decisions without sufficiently understanding the rationale behind them.
In their race against time, enterprises have a tendency to choose those vendors that ship with a lot of pre-built models, and knowing the trend, vendors have also inflated their stock model count. This is a potentially dangerous practice, one that can uproot a brand’s stated emphasis on customer centricity. Enterprises need to make sure they choose vendors that can provide a rationale, in business terms, for the recommendations and actions they undertake, and not go by arbitrary numbers emitted by mathematical models based on never-understood matrix transformations.
For example, if Alice was recommended a four-year mortgage loan while the CSR opines that a three-year unsecured loan is a better option, the CSR should be able to ask the underlying ML as to why it deemed mortgage to be a better option for Alice. In response, the ML should be able to give reasons in business terms (e.g., “Analysis of Alice’s cohorts reveals that there is a 3x increase in chances of bad debt when they consider a loan within six months of engaging with the bank” and not an apparently useless metric (e.g., “Alice’s proximity score to four of the deduced clusters is 0.3, 0.4, 0.1 and 0.2 with a noise level is 0.86—that’s my recommendation”).
5. Be rational and also understand the data limitations.
I have sat through business workshops on customer centricity where the need for brands to connect with the “whys” behind customer engagement is well understood, and then, we come up with a purpose for customer interaction like “To open a fixed deposit for 12 months.” There is an apparent disconnect here.
An end customer like Bob will possibly engage with an intention of “Putting idle money to better use” and possibly wants a safe bet. Hence, his preference for deposit over equity. Thinking from Bob’s perspective, fixed deposit is just a means, not his objective, and until you understand this subtle difference and align accordingly, you will never be able to transform your company into a truly customer-centric brand.
While there is no prescription for success, as Otto von Bismarck rightly said, the wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Not rushing into the same pitfalls others have just managed to come out of is important to stay on the right track.
Want to know how Pelatro can help you improve your customer engagement? Get in touch at hello@pelatro.com
Author
Chief Architect at Pelatro. Proud to help 40+ Telcos/BFSIs offer the finest contextual marketing experience to their 1B+ subscribers. Read Pramod Konandur Prabhakar’s full executive profile here.
This article was originally published here.
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Gone are the days where customers were happy with only a waiver on late-payment fees. While everyone enjoys freebies, they don’t always translate to increased assets under management or loyal customers. That said, taking an iron-fist approach with profits to please the board can cause an enterprise to fall from grace with customers.
How BFSI Marketing Teams can find the Right Balance
Enterprises are aware of this friction. Businesses need profit, and the management is accountable for investors’ money. Customers, on the other hand, expect to be pampered. BFSI enterprises are having trouble finding the right balance. They generally take one of two approaches:
1. Top-Down: With this approach, the business goals and targets are set from above. Sales and marketing divisions are tasked to achieve these goals, and customer experience can take the back seat.
2. Bottom-Up: With this approach, CSAT scores and customer priorities take the front seat. Key result areas are generally tied to sales without accounting for costs. These companies are busy acquiring customers and keeping them happy while profitability takes a back seat.
That said, banks—like most companies—must find ways to balance these two approaches. Here are a few ways to find that balance:
1. Make both “customers interests” and “enterprise objectives” CMO/CSO priorities.
Enterprises should discover the whys behind customers engaging with their brand. They should nudge those customers toward their individual goals using the enterprise’s product offerings and experiences. In doing so, they can’t assume an infinite supply of resources or cash. The products and discounts—including any freebies and vouchers—should be rationed from a pre-allocated budget.
For example, when John visits a bank’s website and clicks a few times around the 8PC_Personal_Loan_1Y product, he shouldn’t be incessantly nudged toward signing up for that product. The bank must first establish a connection with John’s underlying purpose, which could be “short-term credit need.” After that, the bank should work out the case from John’s perspective, taking into consideration his assets and liabilities, products held, credit rating, etc. Finally, the bank can recommend multiple products that help him realize his purpose, which might include “loan at 2% on top of his deposits.”
When recommending the 2% deposit product to John, sales and marketing should be aware that they may be doing so at the expense of possibly recommending the same to Alice, as there should be a rationed quota of products to sell to achieve the desired profit margins.
2. Build hierarchical journey plans.
Based on the above example, banks must build three kinds of customer journey plans: strategic, tactical and operational.
A. Strategic journeys focus on objectives and verifiable targets but do not specifically talk about means to achieve those targets. They always work on aggregate milestones—not in an individual customer’s context—and may cover multiple objectives.
For example, the bank could lay out the quarterly revenue and sales targets with monthly milestones alongside broad annotations:
Month 1: $2 million investments, 25,000 new product sales
Month 2: $1 million investment
Month 3: $3 million investment, 50,000 product sales
Overall goal: Of the 75K new product sales, at least 50% should be upsell and 30% cross-sell.
B. Tactical journeys are defined in the context of individual customers. They don’t carry a complete prescription of all steps from start to end of the journey, and they can have multiple branches along the way. They are defined on a persona and may delegate orchestration to operational journeys, which are described below.
A good tactical journey caters to a single objective from a strategic journey. The bank could, for example, define the five-months journey for first-time-earner persona. This could include monthly guidance milestones to assess progress at the individual level as well as triggering campaigns at stipulated intervals or in response to certain user activity:
Month 1: Ensure no customer complaints and all KYC are complete.
Month 2: Complete zero-party data survey.
Month 3: Recommend two products based on behavioral and contextual data.
Month 4: Check if the customer has signed up for at least one new product since onboarding.
Month 5: Assign a persona based on portfolio value and take a first guess at CLTV.
3. Operational journeys are largely contextual in nature and do not necessarily align with any specific business objectives. They are reactive in order to provide the best customer experience.
A detailed flow diagram, for example, should be based on personalizing engagements by taking into consideration user clicks, activity and inactivity on the banks’s website and app. In doing so, stitch together user actions across channels—such as KYC completed, responded to surveys, etc.—in order to have holistic context for nudging customers.
4. Implement strategies and adopt technology to achieve business goals.
Once journeys are developed, banks should revitalize the marketing and sales activity to align with the hierarchical journeys above. During this process, the CMO and/or CSO team should define top-level strategies alongside enterprise goals and operational constraints.
Technology plays an important role here. For example, domain specialists and analysts punch in the broad outline of tactical journeys, while technology, such as an ML-backed enterprise marketing tool, can take responsibility for curating the actual operational journeys.
Conclusion
To realize large successful business transformations, BFSI enterprises need to maintain equal focus on CSAT and profits. They need to work out a sales and marketing strategy where enterprises serve as a bridge helping customers meet their personal financial goals without taking blind-folded customer-centricity approaches.
Sound journey planning leveraging on strategical, tactical and operational journeys while empowering teams with technology. Only then can companies find the right balance to serve both customers and investors.
Want to know how Pelatro can help you improve your customer engagement? Get in touch at hello@pelatro.com
Author
Chief Architect at Pelatro. Proud to help 40+ Telcos/BFSIs offer the finest contextual marketing experience to their 1B+ subscribers. Read Pramod Konandur Prabhakar’s full executive profile here.
This article was originally published here.
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Leads operate in a no-mans-land between two powerful departments inside banks—sales and marketing. A successful lead curation strategy requires dedicated efforts and collaboration between the sales and marketing personnel.
Are Leads a Sales Function or Marketing Responsibility?
Sadly, leads fall under one of the two in most banks, while it really demands more of an overlap. The marketing function is the think-tank while sales functions as the workhorse. The modern-day lead governance recipe needs data-driven, machine learning-assisted (ML) marketing skills for lead synthesis and effective funnelling, alongside the customer need-gauging and persuasion skills of salesmen for gross conversions.
Sales And Marketing: Proxy Warfare
Owing to fear of missing out amidst carrying the burden of justifying investments in the latest digital tools, sales teams feel obliged to react to every customer action and they set up over-optimistic targets that treat every interaction as an opportunity to sell.
Obsessed with customer-centricity initiatives and the restlessness in putting the best of ML-driven journey analytics into effective use, the marketing unit bombards the customers with high-intensity messages, cooked-up greetings and glorified congratulatory wishes and offers right from the start.
The two, in tandem, end up frustrating the customers to the point where they are left with no choice but to mute the notifications and ignore all communications by the enterprise. I call this “over engagement making way for disengagement.”
The sales approach is mostly reactive and all out, while marketing takes the softer route to a larger base in a proactive manner. The sales team emphasizes quickness while the marketing team advocates accuracy. Sales believes that a larger funnel lays the premise for greater conversions while marketing invests its efforts in curating the right funnel for different products with an equal emphasis on pruning leads deemed a misfit.
Common Foes: Haste And Domain Insensitivity
In today’s tech and data-driven era, it is quite common for professionals to change domains. I often come across people who were running the marketing strategies for an ecommerce company not so long ago that are now driving the strategies for banks. Although less prevalent, I have also come across people who were selling telecom devices a couple of years ago who are now selling investment products.
When people change domains, they also carry forward certain skills from their earlier ones. Add to this the noise created by domain-agnostic-software vendors who sell the same products across different verticals claiming there is little difference between sales in different industries.
Enterprises need to strike the right balance between quickness and correctness when acting on leads and assess them through the lens of their domain.
Consider three different leads in different industries:
Quickness on the retailers’ part is paramount toward realizing a sale in Alice’s case, while in the latter two, the quality of recommendations takes greater priority. In Zoya’s case, a few additional hours taken to respond back to her is always worth it when choosing the best portfolio for her needs.
Nudge Vs. Nurture:
While nudging works in all domains, banks hold an edge when it comes to nurturing. Banks should have a clear strategy on which leads to nudge and which ones to nurture. Merely yielding a conversion on leads could have counted as success in the past, but not in today’s ML-driven, strategic lead governance era.
How Banks Can Unscramble the Lead Governance Puzzle?
To start with, banks should consider two things:
They need to go deeper and understand why other verticals have fared better at lead management. They can:
Banks need to realize that they have greater headwinds than other verticals like Telecom or ecommerce when it comes to digital literacy, but at the same time, they also enjoy greater levels of de-facto trust and long-term commitments from their customers.
A new lead is the initial instance of the customer (knowingly or unknowingly) stating their needs to the enterprise. They are also the best opportunities for banks to reinforce trust without adopting an intrusive marketing or sales strategy. Lead governance deserves strategic importance, but it has always stayed in the shadow of either sales or marketing. It is high time for banks to correct the past mistakes and give lead governance the stature and focus it deserves.
This article was originally published here.
]]>Why Telecom Marketing Leaders Must Attend the Telecom Customer Value Management Forum 2024
To thrive in this dynamic and fast-paced telecom industry, telecom marketing leaders need to be equipped with the latest strategies and insights that can drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. The telco CVM Executive Forum 2024 brings a platform for marketing leaders to unlock unparalleled success and learning.
Navigate Industry Trends:
The telecommunications landscape constantly changes, with new technologies, regulations, and consumer expectations shaping the industry. The Telecom Customer Value Management Forum 2024 provides a unique opportunity for marketing leaders to gain deep insights into emerging trends, enabling them to confidently navigate the ever-shifting industry landscape. From 5G to Metaverse to NFT and other trends shaping the CVM domain, attendees will gain a comprehensive understanding of what lies ahead.
Experts Opinions:
Hear from practitioners and leading industry analysts on the CVM evolution and how they plan to tackle the challenges. The distinguished speakers and leading experts will share real-life use cases, the best tips from their learning and some dos and don’ts of leading a CVM project. CVM is not a one-person or one-departmental job; it takes a cohesive inter-department approach to make it a success. From successful case studies to lessons learned from setbacks, the forum will offer a wealth of wisdom that can shape the future of telecom marketing strategies.
Customer-Centric Strategies:
Customer centricity is not a choice anymore. It has become a necessity for every organization going forward. The forum offers a platform for leaders to explore and discuss innovative approaches to customer value management. Through interactive sessions and live questions & answers, attendees will gain practical knowledge on designing and implementing strategies that resonate with the modern consumer.
Networking Opportunities:
Success in the telecommunications industry is often rooted in strong partnerships and collaborations. The forum will bring together industry leaders, experts, and innovators from across the globe. Attendees can forge connections, exchange ideas, and engage in meaningful conversations. The networking opportunities extend beyond the scheduled sessions, providing a fertile ground for building relationships to drive future success.
Stay Ahead of Competition:
In today’s highly competitive market, staying ahead is not just an advantage; it’s a necessity. The Telco CVM Executive Forum 2024 will be a hub for thought leadership and showcase cutting-edge strategies that can give marketing leaders a competitive edge. By gaining access to the latest trends and best practices, attendees can position their organizations as industry leaders, setting the stage for sustainable growth and success.
Conclusion:
The Telco CVM Executive Forum 2024 is not just a conference; it’s a strategic investment in the success of telecom marketing leaders. By attending this forum, professionals can gain the knowledge, insights, and connections necessary to drive their organizations forward in a rapidly changing industry. As the telecommunications landscape continues to evolve, those who are well-informed and well-connected will be the ones who thrive.
Don’t miss the opportunity to be at the forefront of industry innovation – mark your calendar to join us in Bangkok, Thailand, on the 21st and 22nd of March 2024.
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Content Series by Pelatro
Banks have successfully adopted digitalization to meet the evolving and dynamic customer behaviours. This may sound interesting, but the reality is a bit far from success. Customers are no longer satisfied with the mere availability of digital channels, automation, and self-serve tools to solve their problems. They expect banks to understand and anticipate their financial needs, proactively provide personalized solutions and be more empathetic in their engagement approach. Privacy, security, and trust are the indispensable elements of the banks’ customer-centric engagement approach. In response to the changing market dynamics, a large U.S. multinational bank has revamped its marketing strategy to focus on developing trust and addressing customer needs. The bank aims to rebuild its reputation and strengthen customer relationships by prioritizing transparency and ethical practices.
Let us look at what worked and what didn’t for banks in Marketing in 2023 and the key learning they need to take into 2024 and beyond.
1. Emotions over ease of use
How the customer feels about an experience is more important than the outcome or effectiveness of that experience. Based on a recent survey, feeling valued drives higher loyalty in direct and multichannel banking in the U.S. 87% of direct banking customers stated they would remain loyal to the brand if they felt valued. The trend continues for higher purchasing frequency and advocating for the brand.
2. Data-driven Personalization
Banks and credit unions that effectively harnessed customer data to understand behaviours, preferences, and life events were able to craft highly personalized offers. Capital One leveraged ML algorithms to analyze spending patterns and financial behaviours to provide personalized product recommendations. Another bank employed advanced analytics to analyze customer spending patterns. By identifying customers with high travel expenditures, the bank launched a targeted campaign offering exclusive travel rewards credit cards. The result was a notable increase in credit card acquisitions and customer satisfaction.
mViva’s advanced Analytics and AI-ML capability help banks deliver data-driven personalization at scale. Know more.
3. Omni-Channel Marketing Integration
Seamlessly integrating marketing efforts across various channels provides customers with a cohesive and seamless experience. Many implemented a comprehensive omnichannel strategy, aligning their online, mobile, and in-branch marketing efforts. Customers could seamlessly transition from researching offers on the website to engaging with personalized promotions via the mobile app. This approach not only increased customer engagement but also strengthened the overall brand image.
4. AI-Powered Predictive Analytics
Many have leveraged AI-powered predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and preferences and deliver relevant and personalized offers at the right time. One medium-sized bank utilized machine learning algorithms to predict which customers would likely seek mortgage loans in the coming months. By proactively reaching out with tailored mortgage offers, the bank not only increased its mortgage portfolio but also fostered a sense of proactive customer service.
Learn more about how to implement AI-powered predictive analytics at your bank. Request for demo.
5. Focus more on educational content
Many companies have invested in educational content to promote financial literacy, which is rising after the pandemic. This has boosted customer loyalty and established trust in institutions that offer informative and easily digestible content.
6. Hybrid model gets the preference
Although the trend suggests digital banking is the future, the data shows otherwise. A hybrid model exceeds the CX score compared to a purely digital or physical model. This shows that human experience still forms an integral part of the overall banking experience for customers.
7. Automation is good when well thought through.
Automation brings a lot of success in terms of cost savings, time to market, resource utilization, and more. Yet many faced challenges due to overreliance on automation. Many financial institutions automated their marketing campaigns but failed to personalize the communication. Many customers were disengaged and frustrated because of impersonal and poorly targeted offers. This led to lower CSAT and a higher opt-out rate from marketing campaigns.
8. Be mindful of Regulatory Compliance
In 2023, some financial institutions faced setbacks due to inadequate attention to regulatory compliance in their marketing campaigns. Violations of privacy and data protection regulations to gather more customer data resulted in fines and damaged customer trust.
Taking the learning from 2023 into 2024 and beyond. What Marketers need to keep in mind when creating a Marketing action plan for 2024.
Marketing is not just about sending offers and promotions to customers. It is an interaction between two parties where each expects to derive value from it. Pelatro’s mViva has been designed to keep this in mind. It helps you bridge the gap between customer needs/preferences and business objectives to achieve the best possible outcome for both stakeholders.
My-Marketing-Muse is a content series started by Pelatro to provide marketers with the latest and best learning in marketing in BFSI. You can follow this series to get regular updates to help you plan your marketing and achieve business goals.
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“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.
]]>The “what, when and how” are essential ingredients of personalization. With continued investments in analytics and sustained leverage of machine learning (ML), modern telcos have achieved commendable success in deciding what best to offer (or not offer) to their customers based on their past behaviors and present context. Riding on sophisticated models that deduce the best time to intervene, taking into consideration user preferences, current context and macro influences, the “when” part is fairly addressed.
However, when it comes to the mechanics used to realize the full potential of personalization, telcos tend to lag behind considerably. Often, we are left with dull text messages or pop-ups with boring calls to action and highly predictable post-purchase notifications. There is no excitement left in making a purchase! This is when gamification can help solve this piece of the customer engagement puzzle and make everyday interactions more enjoyable.
What is gamification?
Back in 2002, Nick Pelling defined gamification as “applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic transactions both enjoyable and fast.” In contemporary business terms, it is the application of game mechanics to nongame environments to motivate people, keep them engaged and instill desired behavior.
How can telcos leverage gamification?
Putting customers at the center of business operations and personalization as a major driver of customer satisfaction, telcos should look at gamification from the customer’s side, not the enterprise side. The question is not, “How do I use gamification to sell better?” Rather, it should be “How does gamification help me make my customer experiences better, more engaging, more meaningful and more rewarding?”
Riding on the learnings from how other verticals, including retail, have leveraged gamification, telcos should open up and consider broader adoption outside of just loyalty. They need to use it effectively for the following.
Yet again, personalization holds the key. Whereas luck-based games like scratch cards or dice rolls appeal to some, knowledge-based games like guessing the image or predicting what is next interest others. And skill-based games like puzzles or spot the differences might attract someone else. Investing in easily embeddable games with leaderboards, badges and other means of recognition could help telcos keep customers engaged.
Why should telcos embrace the change?
Given the abundance of behavioral data they have at their disposal, telcos may also use gamification to empathize with the customer. If Bob was streaming late-night soccer finals and he quit at a point that happens to be at the brink of when a good number of other streamers quit, ML can easily predict that was perhaps the repercussion from a low moment in the match during which many desperate fans logged off. In response, it may send a quote or inspirational digital greeting to Bob highlighting instances in which his team has bounced back hard.
About a decade ago, some of this might have sounded like a fanciful tale or wishful thinking. But given contemporary advances in data processing capabilities at scale, the maturity of AI and ML and a greater focus on personalization, some of these scenarios are easily within telcos’ reach.
Telcos should stay up to date with their personalization efforts and consider expanding their budget allocation for gamification to strengthen any weak links in the customer experience. Gamification, when applied the right way across all stages of the customer life cycle, can help telcos regain lost mindshare while also making day-to-day otherwise mundane interactions and experiences more engaging and interesting.
This article was originally published on Forbes.
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As the pandemic has shifted gears on customer behaviour, people are becoming more accustomed to a new way of customer experience. Labelled as an essential service, telecom operators though already aware, realised the heat of evolving mindset during the pandemic. Today’s consumer expects and entertains only value-driven interactions from their service providers. To give you a view of the situation, the customer churn doubled for telcos in India in Feb’21. Every communication must be personalised, customised to their need. Not only this, customers expect businesses to anticipate their future needs and offer contextual, relevant and timely solutions.
This blog highlights some intriguing learning shared by the speakers.
Highlight 1:
Scale is significant for telecom operators as it adds another dimension to the problem of hyper-personalisation in the telecom industry. Personalisation is the default standard for engagement for web, mobile and in-person interactions and telcos can’t rest on past laurels.
Highlight 2:
Research shows that 1/3rd of consumers expect brands to deliver personalisation, and if failed, it’s easier for them to switch brands. Three-quarters of customers switched to a new store, product or buying method during the pandemic. To counter this, telcos can design multiple micro yet thoughtful customer touch points. Something as simple as the relevance of offers, post-purchase checking, and sharing ‘how-to videos to show that the brand care for its customers.
Highlight 3:
There is already a felt need for personalisation in the telecom industry. A normal customer who is exposed to the personalised experiences delivered by the likes of Google or Amazon wonders why their telco, despite having access to all the relevant data about them, is not able to provide a hyper-personalised experience.
Highlight 4:
Companies who opt and invest in personalisation solutions can generate 40% more revenue than others and increase the CLV by 35%. McKinsey research shows that telcos have the potential to generate around $200 billion in value from personalisation alone in the next few years. Telcos must be invested in hyper-personalisation to make the most out of this opportunity and ensure they keep benefiting from future technological innovations.
Highlight 5:
Telcos today must live up to the expectations of dynamic and evolved individuals and plan every single interaction based on subscriber requirements and preferences. Telcos need to consider the behavioural aspect and the context at an individual level. That’s where hyper-personalisation empowers telcos to connect with subscribers in the most authentic way via a value-driven interaction.
Highlight 6:
Things previously rendered impossible became possible during the big data era when telcos started investing in data marts and building aggregated personal customer profiles. Telcos created 100% telcos-centric customer profiles but were completely blindfolded by customer engagement with other dimensions of their life. Then followed the OTT or digital era when the likes of Netflix and YouTube started gaining a mind share. New channels like WhatsApp and Facebook began to replace long-proven and legacy channels like SMS. This was the time telcos started focusing more on AI/ML.
Highlight 7:
Location intelligence was the buzz word during the personalisation era, and almost every telco attempted and achieved different levels of success. The focus was to reach out to the customer in the most relevant manner, but for the offer that the telco wanted to sell. Next is the hyper-personalisation or individualisation era, where telcos are reaching out for customers’ felt needs and not necessarily for what the telcos have to sell at that particular time.
Highlight 8:
Personalisation was essentially a way to be more relevant in customers’ minds. But telcos have their own challenges, starting points, contexts and possibly different literacy levels on their customers. So, if telcos have to take on a sustainable approach to hyper-personalisation, they need to stay invested in it, take the best practices and mould them as per their needs. Success calls for a personalised approach to personalisation, and the prescription varies from one telco to another.
Highlight 9:
Almost 25% of telcos globally are just starting their journey of personalisation. Even within the operators who have initiated pilot projects, many are yet to scale their projects to realise the full potential of hyper-personalisation. In fact, very few telcos are using data analytics and AI/ML to its full potential.
Highlight 10:
Telcos are still experimenting with the idea of hyper-personalisation and are inspired by the success it has delivered for other industry verticals. It has increased the experiment appetite for telco marketers, but to achieve the full potential of hyper-personalisation, telcos need to do the following with agility and speed-
Want to watch the full webinar. Click Here
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With the enormous growth in internet data usage over the past few years, modern telecom marketing analytics systems need to munch real-time datasets such as deep packet inspection for browsing alongside ever-changing locations and other streaming information at rates northwards of 1 million events per second. Telcos need to reach out to customers on the right channel at the right time using the right offers before the context is lost, as relevance holds the key to achieving the desired outcomes. Typically, promotional messages are piggybacked to events like post-call notifications, balance checks and other informational API accesses initiated by the end customer, and in large telcos, this could easily translate to an ask for over 30,000 to 40,000 decisions per second.
Business intelligence systems that operate at such scale are distributed and replicated by design with decisioning logic evaluated at one of the many peers based on load balancing algorithms with continuous state synchronization between the peers. However, given practical considerations around network latencies, system faults, inherent concurrency among different events, data streaming challenges and asynchronous transfers, decisions taken for a subscriber at two different peers can, at times, end up being different owing to different states, and there may not be a canonically correct way for the conflicting peers to arrive at a common plane using well-understood CRDT (conflict-free/convergent/commutative replicated data types) techniques.
Consider that Bob, who has a $2 balance on his sim card while surfing Facebook in the background, drops a message to Dick to recharge for $25 and also makes a call to Alice requesting her to top up $15, and they both oblige nearly instantly. Let’s assume there are two event interceptors, call termination and Facebook browsing at low balance, and the former sees $15 recharge first while the latter sees $25, and they both send two different offers to Bob reflecting the best recommendation from their standpoints — only to realize in a while on receiving the next recharge that they both are wrong and when they try to sync up with each other, they can neither defend their recommendation nor accept the one received from the peer. An engineering solution can help them reconcile on the balance, and a technique like “last writer wins” may crudely choose one of the two offers, but a business solution needs more than that as it puts the end customer at the center of focus.
A business-centric system needs to work a way out in the interest of the end customer, and in line with “N=1, R=G,” the calls taken may be different from case to case. It may involve soliciting both offers with no recall so as to not confuse the customer, or it may be to retain better of the two offers than going for an altogether new one, or it may even be to send a polite on-demand explanation revoking both of the offers in lieu of another more personalized offer. This decision should be taken at the level of the individual customer.
The business end of real-time personalization is where context-aware, user-centric resolution takes precedence over preset mechanized norms that may be acceptable in certain areas of data engineering but fall short in realizing the objective of retaining the best interests of every single customer even at scale. Ensuring accuracy and eventual consistency of data by itself is not sufficient in meeting the goal. An enterprise has to go beyond that to stay relevant and offer the highest value to its end customers.
Telcos need to rise above the personalization limits of classical data engineering and work toward sustained customer-centricity even beyond the moments of intervention by staying open to real-time course corrections at scale in order to preserve the best interests of end users.
This article originally appeared here
]]>With their divergent data sources, telecoms that welcome data monetization will remain profitable and gain an edge over their competitors in the future. But, before that, here are some of the few steps that they should take before making data monetization as their core strategy. These steps should be to:
The customer data needs to be structured and legalized before presenting it to the external enterprises. The most-advanced operators are working on outsourcing services that offer data monetization solutions that can manage compliance and regulatory requirements of data.
This might sound too generic, but before telcos start working on their data monetization strategy, they should understand what exactly their competitors are doing and how! Understanding what competitors are doing in the market can create a lot of difference in building the right monetization strategy.
To analyze what benefit data is bringing to the business, telcos need to partner with a diligent technology partner who can work on data, the right way. For example: if a telco manages to gain insights on people’s movement with the help of the solution that can gauge and collect data, they can even guide retailers on where and how to position ads and promotions to gain the maximum commercial benefits.
Undeniably, data monetization provides a brand with the ability to understand its business and customers while improving their decision making. With new trends revolving around digitalization and AI, 5G, and the IoT, telcos must figure out ways to build effective monetization strategies and know just how the growing market will use their data in the time to come.
One way is by providing ‘partner services’ to third party enterprises to execute personalized campaigns based on insights generated from the high-value customer bases. They could make it easier for enterprises to sign up and perform micro-segmentation using hundreds of both telco and non-telco parameters. Telcos could also support third-party companies in reaching out to a particular potential customer before a competitor does.
In summary, telcos can play a much more significant role in their customers’ digital lives and capture value for themselves as well as the third-party enterprises along the data monetization journey.
Pelatro’s mViva Data Monetization Solution (DMS) presents an opportunity for the Telecom Marketing teams to monetize customer data by easily signing up and charging the EPs (Enterprise Partners). The solution even enables telcos to partner with B2C entities to send campaigns and promotions in a targeted, real-time, contextual, and relevant manner.
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