Forrester: Telcos should leverage Web insights for offline opportunities

Customer acquisition, retention and churn are terms in the vernaculars of every telecom company’s marketing and product development departments. These factors tie directly to perceptions of “success” or “return on investment” for marketing and attempts to bundle products and services in compelling ways. To more successfully target bundles to customers, a recent report suggests that more should be done to integrate massive amounts of data about customers’ online behaviors to “offline” systems.

“As more devices and services intersect with the Web, the gap between the offline and online worlds in enterprises should close,” said Joseph Stanhope, senior analyst of customer intelligence with Forrester Research, who recently interviewed 15 Fortune 500 companies for the report about Web analytics as a foundation for multi-channel marketing approaches. Targeting people involved with data-related and marketing strategies (people responsible for “customer intelligence”), Stanhope found that companies are starting to consider the Web as a “laboratory” to test marketing and design concepts. As telcos sell through more and more online channels — whether direct or through third parties (content, banks, utilities, etc.) — they can perhaps conduct testing of new merchandising or marketing concepts online, where it is faster and more efficient than offline, Stanhope said.

Perhaps other companies are already starting. This might be the strategy, for example, behind Google’s use of the Web for direct marketing of Nexus One.

“By integrating online and offline data, operators and their enterprise customers could add information about customers’ online behaviors to existing customer profiles so that CSRs could more efficiently handle calls and provide more relevant cross sell/upsell opportunities,” Stanhope said. "So much of the customer experience now comes from online activities that there is a huge repository of data that should be pushed deeper into enterprises for insights about interactions; enterprises collect so much data about what people do and see on their Web sites, yet they do little to draw insight."

He believes operators have an opportunity to help their customers (and to internally do the same) push summary data from online channels to different departments, such as call centers. “It would raise the bar in terms of customer experience to have service reps recognize what tech support or product pages were viewed by a customer before that customer calls into the contact center. There can be more intelligence then about what actions to take, said Stanhope said.

Technically, that would require customer databases and enterprise data warehouses integrate with systems used by sales, marketing and product development, such Web analytics and CRM systems. “They could get data out of Adobe, for example, and populate it into critical Siebel CRM systems or Teradata warehouses,” Stanhope said.

It won’t be an easy thing to accomplish, but it could be well worth planning, he believes. “Our clients are starting to plan for and lay the technical foundational by looking at how to bring together disparate environments, like CRM databases and customer databases, and then what they have to do to gather Web data, social media and search data so they can leverage what they already have,” Stanhope said. He added that 73% of those in the survey indicated they already have Web analytics in place. “Many are now starting to look at how that can be a hub for Web data, which can be leveraged by other systems.” He said banks and financial institutions seem to be the first thinking about this. “But telcos would also be a natural, as they interact with customers in so many ways and they really depend on that long-term relationship, which relies heavily on the customer experience.”

Stanhope advised: “Don’t boil the ocean and definitely ‘sweat the details,’ as you want to find out what’s wrong before you start moving data around; you want to validate information and run systems in parallel before you start decisioning.”