Q&A: Personalization in an increasingly mobile world

According to a recent survey from Telesperience and Openet, 90% of customers feel their mobile service provider doesn’t understand their needs. We talked with the companies to understand the problem – and potential solutions.

Connected Planet asked Teresa Cottam, Principal at Telesperience; Monica Zlotogorski, Program Marketing Manager at Openet; and Jonathan Downey, Director of Product Marketing, Openet, about the scope of the work.

Connected Planet: Tell us more about the study.

Teresa Cottam, Telesperience: It was essentially a three-part survey. We looked at two sides of the telco business – IT and marketing and then we looked at the customers themselves.

CP: Can you summarize what you found?

Teresa Cottam, Telesperience: In terms of the customer, we found that although the majority were happy, they felt that their service provider did not understand them or their needs. In terms of regions, Europe was where customers felt most depressed about this. North America, we found, was more upbeat and customers felt that their service providers were beginning to innovate but the real innovation is still coming from the developing world. Generally, though, there is now a move towards ‘value’ and away from simply ‘cheapest’.

CP: What about within the telcos?

Teresa Cottam, Telesperience: Marketing and IT disagree about the road ahead. We actually found that IT is trying to deliver what marketing wants but the level of communication and understanding is still low and is an area that needs addressing.

Personalization, of course, is a goal for all industries not just telcos. I do believe that it is an opportunity for telcos to be very powerful players across all industries. We have the customer data, after all.

CP: If personalization is the goal, what are the barriers?

Teresa Cottam, Telesperience: Grand visions and culture.

In the past telcos were prepared to take on big transformation projects and employ a ‘big bang’ approach to it, but the appetite is waning for that and we need to think in stages. We also need to realize that in terms of better customer experience it is the small and simple things that sometimes create better relationships. We need to become more pro-active and change our culture here. Personalization up until now has been driven by the organization not the customer (as happens too often in telco) but that is changing.

We also need to understand not just our customers, but a customer’s influence. As an example, an elderly lady might not spend more than a dollar a month on mobile phone service. Imagine that something goes wrong, she gets upset with her service provider and churns. The initial analysis would indicate ‘not much damage’. That lady, however, having been upset by her service provider might spark a chain reaction that leads to her entire family churning, which might include several brothers and sisters, sons, daughters, grand children and great grand children. Her son, by the way, is just evaluating the mobile phone contract for his distribution business that employs 100 people.

Without doubt, steps can be taken now to improve the situation that do not require big investment. Simple, intelligent questions are a good start.

CP: What is the real goal here?

Monica Zlotogorski, Openet: The goal is to achieve an ‘emotional’ relationship with individual customers and it is not as difficult as that makes it sound. Personalization is actually a logical progression, which consists of evolving not just policy controls, but also real-time charging and subscriber data management capabilities.

The ‘affectional’ stage is truly dynamic and it is about real-time policy and charging controls, profile management, real-time data analytics and real-time service delivery capabilities.

CP: So where are we now?

Teresa Cottam, Telesperience: We have certainly gone beyond ‘packages’ - in other words the crude definition of a customer as basically a ‘text’ person or a ‘phone call’ person. We are into rules-based personalization, which is still crude – your area + type of phone + intelligent guesses means we will offer you this or that service – to a more sophisticated use of individual customer data that can be used for more tailored offerings.

CP: Is policy management a big part of this? It seems to have a bad press and negative ring to it?

Jonathan Downey, Openet: You are right, and the role of policy management in replacing unlimited plans with data caps has captured headlines, especially in the U.S. However, data caps enable operators to launch more affordable data plans, to the benefit of consumers generally.

It also introduces tremendous flexibility. Policy is rapidly becoming a core component in providing data experience for customers, for instance, by notifying customers of their balances to avoid bill-shock scenarios, to trigger promotions based on a customer’s current activity. Telcos need to use it to manage the customer experience, for instance, by assuring the quality of service on a video stream, to reduce jitter which is less annoying for customers.

CP: To summarize, how do we make this personalization happen?

Teresa Cottam, Telesperience: We need to become truly customer centric. This is much discussed, and there is probably not a company on earth that would say they are not customer centric, but we can do better here. Much better. The real barriers are about culture – data is still siloed, systems are still siloed and CIOs are still talking technology (although this is changing). We need to converge the data sets and we need to ‘converge’ the business units and how they communicate, plan and execute.

CP: Thank you very much.

    stream, to reduce jitter which is less annoying for customers.