Telcos must rewrite customer centricity rules for mobile data

Reactive customer retention models that operators pulled off in voice-led businesses will fall way short of customer expectations in data-led paradigms

It doesn’t need a telecom expert to point out that an area where telcos continue to fare miserably is the way their customer-response teams and systems interact with customers or respond to their queries and requests. Speak to any segment of telecom service subscribers and most of them would have their share of unhappy experiences to talk about.

To use technical parlance, the OSS/BSS (operations support system/business support system) sub-system of the overall IT system at telecom organisations suffers from some serious weaknesses.

The overall customer relationship management (CRM) module, which should ideally offer a holistic view of the customer, instead seems to take a piecemeal approach.

For example, while it is common to see the new-customer acquisition, billing and collection teams to be highly proactive, the same attributes are rarely seen in other teams. In fact, it is equally common to see that the customer churn management and retention processes and teams are reactive rather than proactive in their approaches.

Take the example when a customer places a request to end his or her post-paid data card subscription. In an actual scenario, a customer retention team actually gets triggered into action only after the request has been placed. The retention teams then start calling the customers frantically, especially if those have been high-spending customers, luring them with special plans that they (customers) never even knew before had existed.

In case of a data-only subscriber, for instance, these retention tactics don’t seem to work because the customers would already have decided to migrate, or actually migrated, to another network.

Now, consider for a moment that the customer retention team had been proactive instead of being reactive to a potential churn scenario. They could then have been analysing the subscriber usage data to identify any unusual changes in usage patterns of a given customer over a period of time. Thereafter, engaging those high-spend customers through proactive follow-ups could have brought out revealing insights on customer pain points or development of positive sentiments about the competition.

Now, if we look at the data card service segment, it was earlier dominated mostly by two-three CDMA players, but has been undergoing a radical change in market dynamics after the launch of 3G services. The customer now has a wider, and often, better service options to choose from, and is also on a lookout to migrate for the better. Such customers may slow down their usage of an older subscription while they test out the other options.

If a customer retention team is proactively tuned into subscriber usage data and sees it dropping for some customers, there is stronger likelihood of potential churn being identified before it actually takes place.

The retention teams could then follow up with such customers and find out the reasons for their reduced engagements with the network and the reasons behind that.

A follow-up could reveal that while the telco would have upgraded the network and even increased the points of presence, the dongle being used by the customer could still be an old one, which is not able to leverage the greater speed offered by the current network. Or, the reduced customer experience could relate to a signal issue in a specific area, which again, could be studied and corrected.

But then, the teams could act proactively only if the underlying OSS/BSS systems enable and empower them to do so.

How does one achieve that? In this context, it is important to note that the customer retention models that continue to be practiced are legacies from voice-led telecom business paradigm. As the shift towards data-centric business gets more and more pronounced, OSS/BSS systems will need to undergo some major overhaul too. After all, customer centricity, which becomes many times more significant and relevant in a mobile broadband business scenario, draws its building blocks
from the OSS/BSS modules only!

Deepak Kumar is Founder Analyst at BusinessandMarket.net and specialises in market research and strategic advisory