Level the playing field with digital native services and over-the-top (OTT) providers. That’s a primary objective for many traditional telecommunications companies today.
To achieve this goal, though, these companies must embrace business transformation.
More specifically, traditional telecommunications companies must modernize their data-driven processes and technology stacks to enhance their customer engagement strategies and provide subscribers with the relevant, personalized experiences they’ve come to expect.
To enable this transformation, many telecommunications providers are turning to customer data platforms (CDP) like BlueConic to put customers at the heart of their business, become more data-rich and digitally fluent, and drive innovation across their organizations.
Legacy tech: A deterrent to transformation for telecommunications companies
Two of the most critical first steps in any company’s transformation strategy are:
Identify gaps in and issues with their current data and tech infrastructure
Address those problem areas by investing in solutions that help marketing, analytics, digital product, customer experience, and other growth-focused teams streamline their work and better understand and engage with customers
Often, these gaps and issues exist due to reliance on legacy technologies (e.g., restrictive campaign management software, IT-owned data lakes or master data management systems) that create or reinforce a significant distance between where customer data is stored and where it’s needed to orchestrate and deliver high-quality customer experiences.
For telecommunications companies, that means it’s essential to routinely audit the tools in their technology stacks and discern which solutions:
Do empower business technology users to carry out core tasks (e.g., deliver bespoke experiences and messaging in real time, segment multi-dimensional audiences with ease) without the need for IT assistance, build and deploy predictive models to generate customer scores without the help of data scientists)
Don’t empower those business users to be as efficient as possible (e.g., prevents them from acting on customer data whenever and wherever they need; forces them to execute static, outbound marketing campaigns based on latent, inaccurate, and/or incomplete first-party data)
Roughly two-thirds (65%) of telecommunications companies have a “clear roadmap to digitalization” and understand the value of transformation initiatives at large, according to a 2021 Technology Innovation Council and Upstream report.
But 70% of those organizations indicated legacy tools hinder their ability to generate more revenue, scale business operations, and mitigate data-related risk, according to the study.
This is why so many telecommunications companies invest in CDPs like BlueConic: to replace their dated and inefficient solutions or, at the very least, make them more effective.
Consider the case of a multi-national telecommunications provider that uses BlueConic:
The multi-brand business had lots of customer data stored in fragmented legacy tools. Many of them didn’t share data with one another quickly and seamlessly (or at all).
By un-siloing this data from disconnected systems and sources and unifying it in BlueConic, the company was able to create nearly 3 million new, individual-level, dynamically updated profiles for its prospects and customers.
Making these unified profiles accessible to growth-focused teams and their tools opened up “new ways of working” for the company and saved it $30K thanks to greater cross-functional efficiency and output.
What’s more, by enhancing Salesforce Journey Builder with the power of BlueConic’s unified profiles as well as segmentation, predictive modeling, and lifecycle orchestration capabilities, the telecommunications business was able to increase conversions by 40%.
Revenue growth is certainly a primary metric for many telecommunications businesses.
But this organization was also able to build more scalable and sustainable processes around its business users’ CDP and data utilization and elevate growth-focused teams’ operational efficiency — an equally vital metric for all telecommunications companies today.
How telecommunications companies can transform for the better with a CDP
As our eBrief for telecommunications companies explains, gaining an actionable single customer view is a notable benefit of CDPs like BlueConic. But this comprehensive view, in turn, offers many other pros for these organizations as well.
Aggregate first-party data across brands and/or regions.
For many telecommunications companies, large-scale merger and acquisition activity has resulted in mountains of fragmented customer data sitting in disconnected legacy technologies used by various parts of the organization.
This challenge, in addition to compliance with data privacy measures like GDPR, is often compounded by the fact many telecommunications companies offer multiple products and brands in different geographic regions, countries, and continents.
If these sub-brands have BlueConic in place, they can aggregate their first-party data into a ‘super-tenant’ via our Aggregated Data Manager (ADM). This tenant can then sync all customer data into richer, real-time profiles available to all sub-brands.
Our ADM functionality updates and aggregates on a recurring schedule. BlueConic customers can run connections and AI Workbench notebooks against this data (i.e., build, train, and deploy predictive models to score and better understand customers).
With info regarding prospects’ and customers’ activity (subscription packages, customer service ticket records, historical purchases, app usage, etc.), each sub-brand has rich insights that can help them reduce churn, provide a top-tier CX, and upsell and cross-sell — the latter of which is critical to telecommunications businesses’ long-term profitability.
For example, telecommunications companies can identify cross-brand customer overlap.
This can help them identify interesting customer trends and build more cohesive engagement strategies to prevent those sub-brands from delivering excessive or overly similar/redundant messaging to customers — messaging that could lead to a poor CX and potentially cancellation or churn.
More easily engage with customers across their journeys.
Thanks to BlueConic’s persistent profiles, which includes our Timeline that highlights all ‘events’ associated with customers (e.g., dates and times of website visits, email clickthroughs, customer service interactions), telecommunication businesses can see their customers’ journeys in real time.
This insight into individuals’ brand interactions means growth-focused teams can:
Identify high-value customers (i.e., those with high average order values and/or lifetime value scores) and deliver one-to-one messaging and experiences to maintain loyalty.
Learn who’s likely to churn based on various attributes and activity (e.g., lack of product usage, recent product complaints, lack of email engagement), and set segmentation rules up to automatically add those individuals to a retention-centric Lifecycle.
Test on-site promos for different tiers of contacts (i.e., first-time visitors, repeat visitors, those deemed upsell and/or cross-sell opportunities). For instance, they can show a 15% discount to return visitors with high site momentum, intensity, and/or recency scores to entice them to finally buy.
There are myriad engagement experiments telecommunications companies can run to better engage their target audience. The point is a customer data platform like BlueConic makes this testing smarter, less risky, and more scalable.
Turn anonymous website visitors into known contacts.
Price and product comparison is common among consumers considering switching their internet provider, signing up for a new streaming service, or changing their cell phone plan.
One issue plaguing many telecommunications companies is their inability to identify anonymous visitors so they can provide personalized service and recommendations to them.
With a pure-play CDP like BlueConic, telecommunications businesses can automatically create the aforementioned persistent profiles for each visitor following their first visit.
Once visitors provide some form of personally identifiable information (name, email address, phone number), their profiles automatically update to reflect this new info.
In turn, they become known contacts, and marketing, CX, and other growth-focused teams can better engage them with a mix of relevant and timely messaging (e.g., on-site dialogues, targeted ads, and/or individualized emails promoting products they expressed interest in) across customer lifecycle stages.
Download our “A Single Customer View for Telecommunications” eBrief to learn how unified data helps telecommunications brands better understand and engage customers.