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-

• Recalibrate their Customer Value Management
• Take a leaping stride in mapping 100% of customer’s touchpoints
• Invest in the right Martech partner
• Streamline their operations

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