#1: Customer Engagement 3.0 arrives
In 2020, the nature of customer engagement will change as personalisation - how marketing and customer value management actually engage with customers - rapidly matures. This means a change will be required in legacy campaign and loyalty programme management solution architectures (i.e. a move from relational databases of static customer data and batch processes to a real-time online customer profiling and engagement triggering). Those Communications Service Providers (CSPs) who lead the way will tap the real benefits that can be achieved by moving to CE 3.0.
#2: Subscribers’ perception of value will change
Net Promoter Scores in the telecoms industry are low; yet to date there’s been relatively little analysis of why. 2020 will see a more forensic examination of this question, with facts starting to outstrip rhetoric. One change lies in clearer answers to the question “Does my operator give me value for my money?”. Another will be to better understand global trends such as the price of data where new approaches to pricing differ widely between geographic regions.
Keith Brody,
VP of Marketing,
Evolving
Systems
#3: Artificial Intelligence evolves from headline maker to decision maker
The difference between Deep Learning, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence remains poorly articulated and perhaps also poorly understood. All three phrases are widely used in the industry, but what they actually mean and are being used for is far less clear. 2020 will more clearly define the practical uses of AI in customer base management - and more effectively start to answer questions like “Can/should I trust a machine to determine what price to offer a customer for my services?”
#4: New Best Practices for churn prediction emerge
Can Communication Service Providers realistically employ usage data and trends to predict whether a customer will churn? Can the real drivers of churn be isolated and articulated? If they can, then the causes of churn can be fixed, for instance by triggering personalised discount offers. 2020 may finally see the emergence of new industry best practices for scoring customer churn risks.
#5: Time to Know Your Customer…better
Rob Francombe,
Director of Proposition
Marketing (CVM),
Evolving Systems
Know Your Customer (KYC) will start to be more prevalent in markets globally. Most of Africa and Europe already have KYC or some form of registration already implemented, with India and the Middle East also being KYC markets. It will proliferate more into other geographies such as LATAM and Asia in 2020 and beyond.
#6: 5G - Mobile competes with home broadband
5G will apply more to developed markets but will still fall into the ‘all you can eat’ trap. It’ll be pushed as a premium service based on increased speeds. This will open opportunities for mobile operators to take on the home broadband market in 2020.
#7: Next year, the new party will be around the third party
Customer retention will become more and more important but the way the customer is retained will no longer be primarily through just offering telecom services but instead via combining those with non-telecom services and third-party offers. Partner enablement will become table stakes for success.
Andrew Wright,
Senior Product
Marketing Manager,
Evolving Systems
#8: Telco business models diversify as profits become less and less about telco-sourced revenues
See above! Mobile Network Operators in particular will be more focused on content and selling other product/services with a significant chunk of revenue coming from non-telco partners. This will vary by region but the larger players in each market will have started to diversify their business models by the end of next year.
#9: Watch out for the Enterprise boom
The enterprise market segment will be a major source of growth for M(V)NOs in 2020, with IoT being at the forefront of driving this change.
