Telecommunications companies face many data challenges, from data deprecation to increasing privacy constraints from customers and regulators. At the same time, customers expect them to deliver timely, personalized experiences across channels. But legacy processes and siloed systems make it difficult to understand and act upon their data quickly and meaningfully.
By enabling customer data unification and activation, BlueConic helps telecommunications companies gain new insights and effectively orchestrate individualized experiences across all customer touchpoints in ways that weren’t possible before. While this drives both operational efficiency and profit gains, we’re often asked how to quantify the added value BlueConic brings to marketing and other growth-focused teams throughout their business.
To answer this question, we commissioned Forrester to examine the potential ROI that telecommunications companies may realize by deploying our platform. Below, we reveal some of the findings from that study, including the most common types of operational challenges that led telcos to invest in BlueConic, as well as the benefits they gained after implementation.
Challenges that Led Telecommunications Companies to Choose BlueConic
Telcos struggle with three key challenges that make it difficult to use real-time data to support customer experiences:
1. Siloed, unactionable data for marketing & business teams and their tools
Previously, teams had different views of customer data, and reconciling it was difficult or impossible, resulting in an incomplete understanding of customers and challenges communicating consistently with them. For example, a digital marketing development manager at a multinational telecommunications company explained that customer data existed across different tables with unique identifiers, and reconciling them wasn’t always possible. They said, “It was … a lot of abstracted data in a place we couldn’t really use it.”
2. Lack of data automation leading to manual and time-consuming processes that required IT and analytics teams to support business use cases
In addition to siloed customer data, teams found it difficult to gain access to the comprehensive and unified customer data they needed to make decisions quickly, experiment, and pivot. For instance, the same multinational telecommunications company expressed some of the inefficiencies in their previous environment, stating, “For segmentation, marketers would need to order data, get a specific file, and request support from a business analyst.”
3. Limited types of customer data available to the marketing & business teams
Finally, teams noted that they were limited in the types of customer data they could access, hindering their ability to create a complete picture of customer needs or communicate with them in a personalized way.
Benefits Telecommunications Companies Gained After Implementing BlueConic
Once implemented, telcos found BlueConic empowered their marketing and customer experience teams to operate and activate data in new ways. Some of the benefits gained included:
1. Time savings from ease of use and automation
Through better data availability, automation, and an easy-to-use UI for non-technical users, the study confirmed up to 90% time savings on segmentation, customer journeys and reporting, resulting in significantly reduced costs for the business. A Digital Marketing Development Manager at a telco stated, “Setting up a segment is very, very quick and you can do a lot more testing. ... [In our previous environment], you needed to actually write code to create an audience ... and then you needed to run that on the entire database. In BlueConic, it’s all already there.”
2. Increased profit from better conversion rates
The study also found BlueConic drives higher conversion rates worth almost $2.1 million due to the ability to collect and unify data into profiles to deliver highly relevant personalized experiences to customers. The same telco went on to say, “We can actually use other data sources that we weren’t able to do before. ... What BlueConic helped us with is to actually be able to connect web behavior to customer data so that we can make the audiences more granular, more relevant, and also the communication more relevant for what the customers [are] actually looking for.”
3. Support for future growth
In addition to quantitative benefits, the study also revealed additional benefits that can be unlocked from using BlueConic. For instance, the findings showed telcos can anticipate additional cost savings and business benefits related to time savings, business expansion, and revenue opportunities as they expand their use of the platform. As one telco confirmed, “[BlueConic] makes the data more available for other teams. ... We think [in the future] this will also be more efficient for our analysts to start working in BlueConic instead of our data lake.”
To find out what types of operational efficiencies and revenue BlueConic could unlock for your telecommunications business, schedule your demo today.
