New Comptel Research: Customers Want Personalisation, but Telcos Don’t Deliver

By Niilo Fredriksen, Executive Vice President, Intelligent Data

A word of caution for all mobile operators: there’s a 50/50 chance your customers feel like you don’t actually care about them.

That’s what Comptel found when we commissioned a survey of 2,000 mobile data users in the US and the UK. Our new research report, The Power of Personal, reports that 52 percent of mobile customers feel like they are treated as just another nameless subscriber by their providers.

Obviously, that’s a problem that could lead to churn. Customers that feel valued are three times more likely to stay loyal to their provider, according to our research. Those that don’t feel valued leave, and 59 percent of respondents said they were not fully satisfied with their providers.

So how do you make sure your customers are happy, loyal advocates for your business? Personalisation offers a solution, and the survey found that it’s what mobile customers want from their providers.

In total, 55 percent of respondents said they would be open to receiving more proactive, personalised messages and services from their providers. But, only 13 percent has ever received this type of message.

Respondents said they were favourable to receiving all sorts of different messages, including:

• An alert when they’ve reached their data cap
• A notification when they’re about to trigger data roaming charges
• A message when they’re using more data than usual

But it’s not just about warnings and alerts. According to our research, customers are also open to personalised messages about service offers, whether it’s a discounted data plan, sponsored data plan or a completely tailored plan that fits their exact needs based on service consumption. The key word, though, is personal. If you send customers an offer that doesn’t seem relevant to them, you’re not going to achieve anything but annoying them.

Service providers know a lot about their customers. It’s high time they started to use that data more intelligently to provide better more individualised services and to use that information to save customers money and build much longer lasting loyalty than is the current model. Our report gives you the guidance you need to do that.

You can learn more about our research by visiting comptelcorporation.com/power-of-personal. From there, you can:

• Download the full research report
• Watch video interviews to hear what consumers on the street think about their current service providers and what should be done differently
• View an infographic that summarises the top findings
• Read our new eBook, which has tips on how to put those findings into action
• Explore three use cases of how service providers could better cater to customers through a more personalised approach