From increasing profitability to brand allegiance and reputation, customer experience matters, especially in industries like telecom. In order to keep customers from switching carriers, telecoms have to create a satisfying customer experience, while at the same time, upselling and cross-selling new products and services, and turning reluctant customers into loyal promoters. This is why so many telecoms have turned to experience platforms to help them with hyper-personalization.
What is hyper-personalization? It’s about giving customers what they want when they want it and sometimes delivering an experience they didn’t even know they wanted yet. With a platform like Adobe Experience Cloud, predicting customer behavior and satisfying their needs in the moment becomes possible.
Acquisition and Conversion Through Hyper-Personalization
In order to acquire and convert new customers, telcos must effectively target them, and Adobe Experience Cloud can do that. Adobe Experience Manager allows marketers to personalize customers’ experience on the website with dynamic content, improving their engagement and nudging them towards conversion. AEM also allows marketers to retarget abandoned carts with personalized notifications and emails in real-time, and recommend plans, device upgrades, and other products based on customers’ browsing histories.
Achieving Customer Retention and LTV
The telecom industry is starting to think long-term, shifting away from focusing on customer acquisition to churn management. More importantly, telcos are implementing loyalty strategies in order to keep customers and strengthen their business.
Increase Customer Lifetime Value
With a $315 per customer acquisition cost, it’s more effective for telcos to keep and maximize existing customers than to attract new ones. Hyper-personalized communications can help fill this gap by providing incentives, discounts, and opportunities to cross-sell and upsell products and services to customers. These retention tactics are particularly valuable because they’re tailored to the individual customer, based on customer history and preferences.
Use Cutting-Edge Analytical Techniques
Digital marketers know that data is important, but many don’t realize just how important it is. For many organizations, personalization is a data problem that can be solved by a robust analytics implementation, and marketers should ensure good data hygiene in order to target the right person at the right time with the right offer.
Data collection can help marketers obtain a 360-degree view of the customer over the entire decision journey. This data can include product, offer, usage, and rebate history, as well as data from call centers, web logs, network experience, and pricing and promotions. The data also spans events across the customer journey, including acquisition, onboarding, and upgrade cycles. Third-party data, such as media spend and retail footprint, can also be integrated into the data set, allowing for a fuller picture of the customer journey.
Advanced algorithms that can identify previously hidden variables predictive of customer behaviors can now be applied to large amounts of data. Companies can then analyze the reasons behind those behaviors to come up with solutions.
Adobe Experience Manager’s data analytics capabilities empowered a major telecom to connect the dots across all channels and provide compelling content on every digital touchpoint. This allowed the company to create rich, personalized customer experiences that drive greater brand engagement, increase sales and build long-term customer loyalty. In addition, the company was able to remove silos between IT and marketing, freeing both teams to apply their expertise more effectively. This allowed for increased efficiency and reduced overall QA time.
Segment Your Customers
Data analytics are useful only when they give clearer context about customer behavior to marketers. Marketers can segment their customers into groups that explain customer characteristics, such as transactional behavior, demographics, ethnographics, or customer attitudes. One such group that marketers can create is for customers with the highest likelihood to leave. Analytics breaks down the customer base into a micro-segmentation and then matches the customers with a predetermined list of offers.
Leverage Analytics to Test Next Best Actions
Analytics, of course, can help to predict customer behavior, but actually getting customers to act upon these behaviors is essential to retention. Testing out new offers by customer segment and reduce churn. This involves setting up a structured testing methodology, testing the offers based on certain criteria (such as messaging and mode of delivery), and continually learning from, and readjusting, methods of targeting.
Streamline Operations with Personalization
Operating call centers accounts for 8-12% of a telecom company’s operating expenditure. Adopting digital tools, such as chatbots, IVR, and self-service, can save 60% of operations expenses over three years for telecom companies while improving the customer experience.
Digital tools are also able to improve the average handling time in digital channels. Telcos should view digital customer experience as an opportunity to fix a potentially broken relationship with a customer, since customers visiting the support section of a website usually means they are looking to fix something.
Digital tools with hyper-personalization can guide customers in self-service instead of contacting a call center, which risks deflection and an unsatisfying experience for the customer. Taking the interaction online can also reduce operating costs for the telco. If the customer does choose to contact the call center, he or she can be directed to the company’s website when appropriate to cut down on call length, and the telco can even leverage RPA to speed along the process.
Hyper-personalization through Adobe Experience Cloud allows telecom companies to deliver tailored experiences to customers, nudging them toward the next best step in their buyer’s journey and increasing their loyalty to the company. In turn, these tactics can increase retention, and overall customer lifetime value, for the company. The telecom company that stands apart from the crowd through its digital experience will grow a loyal fanbase whose members won’t even think about switching carriers.
Brian Payne
Managing Director, Strategic Alliances