How Advanced Analytics Proactively Future-Proofs Your Telco Business and Reduces Churn

In today’s business world, it is no secret that it is more expensive to acquire new customers than retain current customers, and this is true for the telecommunications industry. The question is, how do you reduce customer churn and continue to upsell to your existing customer base? The answer lies in advanced analytics. Below we dive into how advanced analytics software future proofs the Telco business and reduces churn.

The Changing Needs of Consumers

Consumers today are not the same as consumers five years ago. Things have changed, digital transformation continues to shift how we live and work, therefore shifting customer behaviour, needs, and wants.

Telcos are uniquely positioned to answer these specific needs, especially since mobile use has become a necessity for customers’ personal and professional lives. Telcos provide what many would consider a necessary service in today’s world. The problem is that the market is incredibly competitive. As a Telco, you need to be on top of your game and know your market, how your customers use the network, and what they are looking for. With this knowledge comes the ability to adapt, adjust, and innovate your business to better meet your customers changing needs and wants.

When this is managed correctly, you can reduce customer churn, which is vital to the success of the Telco business. Now you might be asking how does a Telco gain the insight needed to reduce customer churn? The answer lies in Advanced Analytics.

Advanced Analytics Defined and Why We Need Advanced Analytics in Telecommunication?

Advanced analytics for big data have become synonymous with the business world, and for a good reason. Before we look at how advanced analytics impacts a Telco, we need to define advanced analytics.

Gartner defines advanced analytics as the autonomous or semi-autonomous examination of data or content using sophisticated techniques and tools, typically beyond traditional business intelligence (BI), to discover deeper insights, make predictions, or generate recommendations. Advanced analytic techniques include data/text mining, machine learning, pattern matching, forecasting, visualisation, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, network and cluster analysis, multivariate statistics, graph analysis, simulation, complex event processing, and neural networks.

In this way, advanced analytics helps Telcos make sense of complex data to help identify patterns, diagnose problems, and predict resolutions. 

Simply put, advanced analytics generally refers to the process of taking raw data from several different network data sources, using machine learning and artificial intelligence to collect, store, clean, organise, and interpret the data into actionable and meaningful insights related to every aspect of the business from network performance, customer behaviour, operations, performance, service delivery, and more.

Armed with these insights a Telco can:

• Enhance decision-making as they have all the current and historical data needed to identify possible trends and benchmarks as well as any problems or opportunities for improvement.
• Improved agility and response as the data is available in almost real-time, which allows Telcos to be able to identify problems, mitigate risks, and find solutions fast.
• Ensure a greater return on investment (ROI) as the data provides the insight needed to better target customer segments which improves overall profitability.
• Allows a Telco to be fully prepared for unexpected circumstances by providing insight that showcases upcoming trends and identifies elements to which the Telco can respond.
• Improve data sharing and employee empowerment by providing a holistic view of data across departments and operations, which promotes communication and aims to help identify and solve problems before they arise.
• Enhance consumer satisfaction and customer retention, which is the backbone of a Telcos success, by identifying customer needs, wants, and problems and providing solutions to these.

From the above, it is clear that advanced analytics plays a vital role in the Telco business and its ability to remain successful. One of the points mentioned above is critical to this and needs to be fully understood. This is customer acquisition and retention, which we elaborate on below.

Customer Acquisition vs Customer Retention

There has been much debate on what is more important to a Telco, customer acquisition or customer retention. Many Telcos have focused on customer acquisition in the past, but this is changing. The focus has shifted from acquisition to customer retention for two reasons. The first is that it is more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain them, and the second is that when the focus is on client retention, there is generally a reduction in customer churn. Both elements significantly affect the Telco business.

Research has suggested that 77% of all customers retract their loyalty more quickly than they did three years ago, which means customer retention in the telecommunications industry is harder to achieve than ever before. This means that Telcos need to work much harder to reduce customer churn and increase customer retention.

Advanced analytics is proving to be a valuable tool in solving this problem for Telcos.

Reducing Churn Through Advanced Analytics

To unpack advanced analytics examples and their impact on churn, we need to define what customer churn is. Customer churn is also often referred to as the churn rate, which is the rate at which customers stop doing business with an organisation. It, therefore, measured the business’s loss of subscribers over a period of time. This loss can be attributed to:

• The cancellation of a subscription or service.
• The downgrading of subscriptions.
• Customers leave your business within a given period, typically the last 30-days.

Customer churn directly impacts revenue churn. Revenue churn refers to the amount of lost gross revenue over a period of time. When you experience customer churn and cannot acquire new customers to fill that loss, you will experience a revenue churn.

From the above, it is clear that churn directly impacts the profitability and growth of the Telco business, especially since acquiring new customers is so expensive.

So how can you ensure that a customer stays with you as a Telco? The answer lies in providing a great customer experience and answering customers’ needs. The overall customer experience is what keeps people from moving to another provider. Understanding who your customers are and what they value is the foundation of this. Now you may be thinking, how do we find that out? The answer is Advanced Analytics. 

How To Reduce Customer Churn?

Advanced Analytics forms the basis of customer retention and therefore reduces churn, in three powerful ways, by providing:

A detailed understanding of customers and customer segmentation

Advanced analytics tracks and manages the entire customer lifecycle, empowering providers to make the best decisions to retain customers. The software allows you to drill down into all the details you need about subscribers: 

• Where do they live?
• How much do they spend?
• What device do they use?
• Which base tower do they use?
• What services they are using?

Advanced Analytics provides a view into customer behaviour, trends, and usage patterns for companies to tailor effective packages, offer competitive pricing, and take action on the spot where necessary to retain subscribers.

Alerts of potential churns

Telco analytics software solutions provide alerts of potential churns as people stop using the service before they cancel their subscription. This allows providers to adapt and respond immediately to retain the subscriber.Providers can access information about:

• Changes in value-added service purchase behaviour.
• Changes in traffic ratio.
• Changes in the most used location.
• Trend analysis for subscriber movement in and out of the network.

All CDRs, VOIP, LTE, Roaming, IoT, VAS, and any other event records may be analysed in real-time to discover emerging patterns in the services or subscriber behaviour.

Customer segmentation

Customers want personalisation, and while providing a singular service that is personalised to a specific customer would require too many resources, you can group customers into specific segments to provide them with a personalised approach. Based on specific traits and behaviour, subscribers can be placed into relevant segments to avoid customer churn. 

For example, subscribers who regularly run out of data can be offered higher data usage packs at a discounted rate or educated about packages that may save them money. Advanced Analytics allows Telcos to group customers to achieve more effective marketing and provide a richer customer experience.

How Adapt IT Telecoms CDRlive Assists in Reducing Churn

There is no doubt that Advanced Analytics play an important role in helping Telcos to reduce churn. Let us now take you through our Advanced Analytics solution powered by CDRlive technology.

This platform converts data, which for Telcos is in the form of Call Data Records (CDRs) as well as other essential network data, into actionable and valuable insights that the business can utilise in near real-time. This information provides data relating to how users use a phone system, the internet, video calls, SMS, etc. CDRs specifically provide hundreds of fields for each call record and information related to each call type.

This data, as it stands, is unstructured, but by using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, this technology turns the CDR data into understandable and valuable insights. This near real-time data is clean, catalogued, and reliable, making it perfect for reporting as well as technical and analytical data exploration relating to churn tracking.  The information is then transformed into analytics presented on an easy-to-interpret dashboard. These analytics will allow you to:

• Understand your own and your competitors’ churn drivers.
• Provides the decline and churn drivers per segment and geographic location.
• Decrease your retention costs.

Over and above this, the value associated with this solution is the ability to analyse data relating to customer behaviour, trends, life cycles, and more. This insight allows you, as a Telco, to ensure that your products and services meet customer needs, that your service levels ensure a good customer experience, and that you are on the pulse of what your customers want. Armed with this information, you can upsell products and services, develop new offerings that speak to their needs, address any problems fast, and ultimately reduce churn.  

Conclusion

Customers and the telecommunications market, in general, are changing, primarily due to several factors, including digital transformation. With this shift has come an increase in competition within the market, making it essential for Telcos to focus on customer retention to ensure the future of their business. One way to reduce customer churn and increase retention is through advanced analytics. Advanced analytics solutions, like our CDRlive platform, empower Telcos with insight into consumers, their behaviours, buying patterns, trends and more. This insight is then utilised to enhance customer offerings and services, improve customer experience and increase customer satisfaction, reducing customer churn. For more on our CDRlive technology, download the whitepaper here.

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