Telecom subscriber behavior is changing dramatically due to the pandemic – subscribers’ service usage, buying patterns, and online consumption patterns are very different. And as our world has become more digital and subscribers less patient, your customers can more easily jump ship – switch to another operator if they don’t like the experience with your service, they see a better marketing offer or a better priced plan. They don’t even need to go into a store to make the change, it’s easy to activate the new service online from home thanks to the digital on-boarding solutions that many providers have adopted following the pandemic.
In 2021, the opportunity for customer churn will be even greater. If operators can’t find a way to gain customer loyalty with their service offerings and experience, they will eventually keep losing them and it’ll be even harder to win them back. Here are 3 trends we’re seeing that will help operators win loyalty and grow profits in the new year.
#1 Outside-in/Inside-out Strategy
I think we’ll see CSPs take a much more holistic view of customer experience and the impact of customer experience to their network and third parties, such as Netflix and the like. To do this, they need to deeply understand individual subscriber experience and behavior – to take an ‘outside-in’ approach, using analytics to bring the outside perspective of network and service performance from the view of the subscriber in, to inform how the network is impacting each subscriber’s experience. This subscriber experience can then be used to train algorithms, allowing the use of AI and machine learning techniques to identify the complex relationships of key quality indicators (KQIs) along with other attributes such as the subscriber’s location, device manufacturer, software version and service type. These trained algorithms can then be applied from the ‘inside-out’, providing the operator with analytics insights to understand how network operations are impacting subscriber experience on a micro-segment basis.
Operators have even less time to react in our always-on pandemic environment, so these insights will need to be real-time. When insights are available only after a problem occurs, all the network operations team can do is apologize. Analytics information about what is happening, where it is occurring, who is impacted, and actions that can be taken by the operator will need to be developed as the issue is occurring to prevent and neutralize the damage it can potentially have on the end user.
These insights for the operations teams require operational intelligence tools such as real-time stream processing, edge analytics and online machine learning. Real-time stream processing acquires, enriches and aggregates massive volumes of data, such as generated by 5G networks, while using half of the compute/processing-related hardware required by traditional analytic and big data solutions. Stream processing combined with edge analytics based on standard data manipulation language such as SQL provides the flexibility for CSPs to generate insights to meet customers’ on-demand service experience expectations with 5G. Locating insight creation close to the data generation saves time and cost, allowing data wrangling, aggregation and enrichment as well as scoring to be done before data has to be collected and stored in a traditional processing/storage cluster.
By Anis Chemli
Vice President
Guavus
#2 More Proactive Operations – Saving Costs and Lives
With the pandemic, there will also be more pressure on operators themselves and their workers working from home. They’ll need AI and predictive analytics on the network, proactive maintenance and operations to quickly address issues, reduce truck rolls and cut costs. With real-time stream processing combined with anomaly detection, fault correlation, and root cause analysis, they’ll be able to improve customer experience by reducing the time it takes their technicians to restore service when a problem occurs.
These integrated, smart analytics can also help avoid illness, save lives, and drive down CSP liability and costs in the face of the pandemic. Often technicians are being asked to enter customer homes where the status of COVID-19 is unknown. The same is true for technicians being dispatched to CSP data centers to fix a problem there; more people on-site only increases the chances of infection. Running analytics on big data from CSP networks enables operators to instead figure out where problems lie upfront. If they can fix the problem remotely, they can avoid unnecessary contact with customers or other technicians in their data centers.
#3 Analytics at the Core of 5G Multivendor Networks and Standards
Analytics will no longer be an overlay or afterthought in 2021 – it is required for 5G in order to cut latency and address operators’ increasingly complex multivendor networks. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has put analytics at the very core of 5G with its new Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) standard, which specifies how to provide and use analytics information in 5G networks.
Operators face a significant challenge maintaining and improving network service quality and availability as the environment gets more complex in a number of dimensions with 5G. With the diversity of services and devices, understanding each subscriber’s network experience cannot easily be done directly from network KQI values, which capture a view of network performance from the perspective of the network. And scaled across hundreds of KQIs and services, thousands of locations, millions of devices, tens of millions of connections -- understanding subscriber experience from the ‘inside-out’ quickly grows complex. This complexity makes it difficult and expensive to scale as the network and services simultaneously evolve.
With the ‘outside-in’ perspective of customer experience mentioned earlier – applied to the information available from 5G networks and combined with advances in computer science, data science and computing scale – I think we’ll see operators increase network operations effectiveness and dramatically improve customer experience – gaining the loyalty and profits they’re looking to gain in 2021.
