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Tiding the ARPU Worry with BI

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Mohit Rampal , Managing Director, South Asia, Motricity

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With the telecom industry in India going through turbulent times and diminishing revenues, operators are looking at ways to improve their profitability and ARPU now. And with the regulatory bodies imposing stringent measures it is becoming more difficult for them to promote Value Added Services. Customers presently find usage adoption of VAS service difficult as finding the relevant content is a constant issue. Today, with the advent of bulk SMS, customers are bombarded with numerous SMSs, most of them being irrelevant. All these issues keep adding to the woes of the customer resulting in a high dissatisfaction level and in turn increase the churn and decrease the stickiness.

Snapshot

Price: Telcos

USP: How BI can help telcos gain insight into their entire customer relationship

Related articles: Global BI Service for Telecom Companies http://tinyurl.com/3grcahz

Search engine keywords: Business Analytics, BI for telecom

Write to: pcquest@cybermedia.co.in for more info.

Operators are now looking to understand the relevancy of VAS services and how these services can help them increase their ARPUs. They are trying to recognize the importance of relevant content and feel to reach the stage where they need to understand the customer better. However, presently, most providers of VAS services do not use advanced techniques for predictive analytics or business intelligence effectively which can help in improving relevance.

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Effective use of BI

Operators should start using BI effectively to do away with the problem. The departments that can use BI are marketing, sales, operation, network planning, and customer care serviceIf you look at the present scenario for mobile VAS, you would hardly see any relevancy of what the customer buys versus what is positioned to him as an upsell. Relevancy of VAS is questioned! BI can come to the rescue here. For instance, capture the type of music a customer has put on as his ringtone, capture location based information using LBS service, find out types of recharge and number of times the user does a recharge, value of recharge, type of handset used, etc, for a period of three months. If you were to then use industry data which could capture most of these features based on type of handset, etc and map this information with the one we captured earlier, you could create an effective BI tool which could help us understand the customer much better. Using effective tools and business logic you could arrive at a recommendation for each criterion of clients and then effectively push them to relevant content. This would result in increase in usage, reduction of churn as customer gets a 'feel good factor' and of course, increase in APRU.

BI could also be used by the network team to prepare itself for outages. For example, if an operator is planning to launch new smartphones it can monitor the usage of phones and the type of data getting consumed. The same could be then run to understand the usage pattern based on various parameters such as phone type, type of content that is used, usage time, etc and create a logic which could help them ensure with right plans for managing outages or signs of an outage.

The same network usage analysis could also help the operator's marketing team plan introduction of voice or data packs during non-peak hours which could help them reduce traffic during peak hours and also effective utilization of their network. It could also come in handy for them to handle their CRM teams more effectively as they would be equipped to sell to their customer's effective plans which could in turn help better utilization of traffic. BI integrated into the operators system can effectively help the operator create a strong tool which can help him show value add to the large advertisers. Advertisers through BI can ensure relevant SMS/advertisements being delivered to the right target audience. For such concentrated advertisements, the advertiser may not mind paying a premium which will directly help the operator to size up its ARPU.

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