How AI Can Revolutionise Customer Engagement for Digital Telcos

Artificial intelligence has become a hot topic in tech for many reasons, but one of the most important is its ability to improve customer engagement. At Comptel, we’ve seen first-hand just how significantly this technology can boost the effectiveness of customer campaigns.

Last month, I visited Singapore for CommunicAsia2017, an international conference for the ICT community. There, I shared some of the initial findings from campaigns using our FASTERMIND technology, which brings the power of AI to digital telcos in the form of customer engagement automation.

The example I shared compared the impact of using FASTERMIND for automatically triggering contextual marketing offers to customers in real time against traditional batch marketing methods. The comparison included three mobile data packages: one weekly pack for 1.5 gigabytes, a 50MB daily pack, and a 10MB daily pack.

In all cases, contextual marketing offers that were sent in real-time enjoyed significantly higher response rates compared to offers sent by the batch. The numbers speak for themselves:

Why were the real-time results drastically better? FASTERMIND analyses in-the-moment contextual data about each customer to predict and recommend the best next action for the operator. In the case of mobile data plans, FASTERMIND could be tuned to automatically send specific packages offers only to those customers whose recent or current behaviours, activities, and historical personal preferences seem to indicate a preference for that package. Importantly, the offer is sent in real-time, at the precise moment when that customer’s buying interest is at its peak.

As a result, this AI-driven form of real-time marketing is not only more efficient but also more effective than even the most specific segmentation-based batch offer. The two core tenets of AI – its ability to modify behaviour through learning, and then automatically act based on analysis – allows marketers to create campaigns that more closely match what customers want.

Our recent research report, The Power of Personal, showed that 55 percent of today’s consumers want to receive personalised service, while 73 percent say the most important quality to good customer service is the feeling that a company values their time. FASTERMIND’s AI-driven engagement satisfies these demands by enabling personal offers only when customers are likely to care about them, limiting disruptive and irrelevant offers.

Of course, omnichannel factors into this as well. AI will allow operators to create personal, real-time customer journeys across devices and a retail shop, which matches the omnichannel experiences most consumers already create for themselves. If your customers are already browsing on PCs, buying on tablets, and sharing on mobile, then your interactions with these customers must match their expectations across devices.

AI empowers that, letting you orchestrate ideal experiences across multiple touchpoints. Imagine a buyer shopping for a new phone on your website is interrupted and neglects to complete the purchase. Rather than letting that smartphone remain unpurchased in their digital shopping cart, you could send them a push notification the next time they walk by your physical retail location, reminding them to complete the purchase. To stimulate action, you could sweeten the deal with a promotional discount offered with a limited validation time.

Ultimately, real-time decisions, based on a bevy of data from different sources, create better experiences from customer acquisition, purchase, upsell, ongoing nurturing and retention. The result? Higher Net Promoter Scores, shorter time-to-market for new services, higher engagement, and much lower total cost of ownership.

That’s the crux of the message I shared at CommunicAsia 2017, where I also participated in a panel discussion on the future of IoT in business. Both technologies – AI and IoT – offer tantalizing opportunities to reimagine how telco serves and engages with customers. Comptel is excited to lend our voice to those conversations at this and other important industry events.

Learn more about FASTERMIND, AI for digital telcos, on the Comptel website.

Comptel and Salesforce Empower Digital Omnichannel Experience with Next Best Engagement Solution

In today’s omnichannel world, the digital customer journey often begins online or on a mobile device, but is later completed in person, over the phone, or through a different digital channel. In fact, even though most customers start their journey online, 69 percent of customers turn to retail stores to complete their purchase.

Telcos have a vast amount of customer data at their fingertips, and yet most digital communication service providers still lack the ability to connect the dots throughout the digital customer journey. To solve this issue, Comptel introduced the Next Best Engagement solution with Salesforce, which will empower the omnichannel customer journey for digital telcos, during this year’s Mobile World Congress.

The Next Best Engagement solution is powered by Comptel’s Fastermind, which recommends, predicts and automates real-time decisions for the most suitable actions in a customer’s journey. By combining Fastermind’s applications for digital telcos and the Salesforce Marketing, Sales, Service and Community clouds’ capabilities, the Next Best Engagement solution allows operators to recommend and trigger actions that enable more personalised marketing and sales opportunities and more responsive customer care.

Filling the Gaps in the Digital Customer Journey

There are many major chasms in the digital customer experience that Next Best Engagement can help address. For example, mobile providers struggle to identify customers who are both an individual retail customer, as well as a customer on a business plan through their employer. Similarly, they are also unable to recognise when a customer begins the customer journey online and later calls or enters a brick-and-mortar store to continue that same process.

These are major shortcomings for telco service providers, as Generation Cloud customers – whether B2B or B2C – expect personalised, contextual, and seamless experiences across all touchpoints. For example, if a customer walks into a retail store, it’s important for the service provider to know where that individual left off in the journey so that they can offer them a personalised experience and entice them to complete their path to purchase.

Next Best Engagement helps improve interactions at each stage in the customer journey, as operators reach customers through multiple sales transactions, product interactions and service engagements. Utilising data from each of these interactions, the solution can provide the real-time intelligence operators need to maximise each touchpoint, fostering long-term loyalty through personalised service.

Proactive, Personalised, Contextual Recommendations

As Comptel’s Power of Personal research found, 55 percent of mobile customers are interested in receiving personalised, proactive service offerings from their mobile provider. However, operators are missing a huge opportunity here, as only 13 percent of customers are actually receiving these offers.  Next Best Engagement with Comptel’s Fastermind and Salesforce’s leading customer engagement platforms is able to predict, recommend and automatically trigger full-blown personalised journeys in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Not only does this enable operators to offer proactive and personalised experiences consistently, but based on the analysis, it helps target the right customers with the right services, at the right time. Even though customers are open to receiving new offers from mobile providers, if it is not provided in the right time or place, then it will likely be ignored.

By combining proactive service offerings with the appropriate context, telcos can acquire new customers and reduce churn with current customers who engage with service providers across multiple channels throughout the digital customer journey. With Next Best Engagement, telcos will ultimately be able to anticipate the fastest and most personal way to offer customers what they need, when they need it, through the most convenient channel for them.

Comptel will showcase the Next Best Engagement solution as a part of the “Maximising Engagement with Predictive Customer Journeys” Catalyst with Salesforce at TMForum Live! in Nice on May 15-18, 2017. Book a meeting with Comptel at TMForum Live! by emailing [email protected]. 

Analysys Mason Recognises Comptel Among World’s Top Mediation Players

The analyst firm Analysys Mason has released a new Comptel Company Profile, recognising Comptel as one of world’s leading data processing vendors. The report also lists our DATA REFINERY software suite as a top-six mediation solution when ranked by worldwide marketshare.

The report, titled “Comptel: digital transformation,” analyses Comptel’s overall product portfolio, 2015 financials and strategic direction. DATA REFINERY is based on Comptel’s award-winning EventLink technology, providing a software suite for convergent mediation, roaming management and enterprise data processing software products. It provides a comprehensive and productised data integration solution with over 1,000 off-the-shelf online, real-time and offline interfaces.

Across the world, 150 operators trust Comptel’s data processing to turn massive amounts of raw data into valuable, purpose-driven, real-time actions. Operators of all sizes and volumes rely on DATA REFINERY, including India’s Bharti Airtel, Indonesia’s Indosat, Argentina’s Telefonica, Saudi Arabia’s Mobily, Denmark’s TDC and The Netherlands’ Ziggo. In all, Comptel processes more than 20 percent of the world’s mobile usage data through our software solutions.

DATA REFINERY plays an important role in supporting the Digital Customer Journey, which is all about applying better technologies and data-driven business strategies and models to improve the way telcos engage and serve their customers in a personalised and contextual way.

Within that journey, DATA REFINERY provides a layer of intelligent fast data to enable real-time decisions and actions. The software has the capacity to capture and process vast amounts of raw data in-stream. As a totally vendor, technology, and service agnostic solution, DATA REFINERY captures data of any type and from any source, including social media, apps, connected devices, networks, locational data and services. It then refines that data with important contextual information and sends it on to the next stage of its journey – all in real time.

As a result, DATA REFINERY allows telcos to build a 360° profile of their customers based on diverse data sources. That profile is then available for other business systems, allowing telcos to craft intelligent, individualised service offerings, customer programs and more. Additionally, DATA REFINERY hides all technical complexity between the network and OSS/BSS layers through a unifying processing layer.

To provide a perfect, personalised Digital Customer Journey, DATA REFINERY’s intelligent data fabric works seamlessly with two other pillars of that journey: FASTERMIND™ for customer engagement automation and MONETIZER™ for agile service monetisation. All three software suites rely on the same EventLink technology platform, benefiting from common capabilities such as a broad online and offline interface library, programmed and automated fast data processing, operational intelligence, business and operations reporting and a Software Development Kit (SDK).

Together, the solutions within the Digital Customer Journey help telcos take advantage of a rapidly changing landscape, one in which the customer is in control. Our solutions allow telcos to compete and win on the basis of customer engagement, with personalised and contextually relevant content, offers and services.

We’re proud to be recognised by Analysys Mason alongside other top players in the mediation market. To learn more, download “Comptel: digital transformation,” a company profile from Analysys Mason.

Comptel Recognized by 451 Research for ‘Transforming CSPs into ‘Offer-Driven Operators’

Operators are on a journey to become true digital telcos. Rich Karpinski, a US-based analyst for 451 Research, recently explored how Comptel’s FASTERMIND™ helps put CSPs on the fast track to becoming offer-driven, digitally-savvy operators.

“Few vendors have as a pure a vision of how mobile operators must evolve to become digital service providers as Comptel. It speaks the language, understands the requirements, absorbs and applies the use cases.”

Transforming operators into Digital Service Providers is at the heart of Comptel’s Nexterday vision. To execute on that vision, Comptel recently launched the FASTERMIND™ suite at Nexterday North 2016, to provide artificial intelligence applications for digital telcos. FASTERMIND™ recommends, predicts and automates real-time decisions, particularly supporting customer engagement automation.

“Rather than rely on a small handful of customer segment buckets and static, non-real-time campaigns to drive out offers, FASTERMIND’s monitoring and analytics tools work with other Comptel platforms – Monetizer for policy control and charging and Data Refinery for mediation and data processing – to allow operators to deliver more real-time, personalized and contextually relevant offers.”

Comptel’s Nexterday vision and strategy has garnered a great deal of attention in the market, and we are pleased to secure external analyst recognition for this new FASTERMIND™ suite, and also for our work in helping CSPs to evolve into DSPs by rethinking and redesigning customer engagement with real-time and contextual best-next-action offers.

“It’s not about bundling a digital ‘service’ like Dropbox or Netflix or simply offering a few new mobile data plan options. Rather, it’s a rethinking of how mobile operators interact with their customers, understanding their real-time needs and wants and having the analytics, decision-making and network execution capabilities to hit them with the right offer at the right time.”

Comptel’s Nexterday vision focuses on providing customers with an outstanding and memorable digital experience. By coupling FASTERMIND’s  time-sensitive, contextual and personalised recommendations, with MONETIZER™, an easy-to-use tool for the rapid design of policy and pricing offers, and DATA REFINERY™, which captures a real-time 360° view of the customer, CSPs are fully equipped for future business growth.

“More aggressively than almost any competitor, Comptel has swallowed the ‘red pill’ and sent itself fully down the digital telco path.”

Rich Karpinski’s full report, Comptel speeds operator offer decision-making with FASTERMIND can be downloaded here.

Comptel will be exhibiting at MWC17 in Barcelona February 27 – March 2, 2017. Meet with us at stand #5G40, Hall 5 to learn more about our Nexterday vision and FASTERMIND™ for customer engagement automation.

With My Digital Moments, Operators Can Create the Perfect Digital Customer Journey

Customer experience is the new battleground for telcos. Forrester Research found that 72 percent of companies say that improving customer experience is their top priority. As a provider, if you can engage your customer at the right time with the right personalised service, you have an opportunity to deliver value, establish loyalty and grow your business.

So, what do customers want? To start, they expect full control of their digital life, and the freedom to build their own personal ecosystem of apps and services.

That’s why Comptel launched “My Digital Moments,” a new solution that enables perfect digital customer journeys. With My Digital Moments, customers will benefit from a self-service app on their phone that, in real-time, analyses how they consume digital services. From there, the app can recommend relevant and personalised digital services that would improve their experience.

My Digital Moments opens the door to several value-driving possibilities:

• Service offerings that are proactive, personalised, relevant and contextual
• Increased customer engagement and communication through a direct line to the operator
• Improved engagement by giving customers direct visibility into their plan status and special packages

From the main screen, customers are able to view real-time service usage information, including the percentage of the data they’ve used in this cycle and their data usage trend across specific apps. On top of that, the app can display the operator’s full service portfolio, including new service plans or promotional packages from the portfolio.

My Digital Moments relies on real-time usage monitoring and intelligence from FASTERMIND™ to recommend, predict and automate customer offers based on the most relevant and contextual data. For example, a customer who consumes a lot of mobile data watching Netflix but does not currently have sufficient mobile data could receive an offer for a data plan with unlimited Netflix streaming.

My Digital Moments is also supported by MONETIZER™, which offers the easy and agile configuration of data plans, plus a common platform for charging and policy design. The result puts full control in the hands of your customers, meaning they can self-select relevant, contextual plans or instantly upgrade their data speeds and allocation in the moment.

Of course, new service opportunities can crop up at any time – not just according to your campaign schedule. That’s why My Digital Moments is supported by closed-loop analysis and service recommendations, which means service usage is monitored on an ongoing and real-time basis to ensure your customers are constantly engaged and presented with easy opportunities to get the services they need.

The solution puts the power in the hands of consumers, giving them the opportunity to build their personal digital ecosystems while empowering operators to increase service consumption, reveal new revenue opportunities and nurture loyal, long-term customers.

Heading to Mobile World Congress 2017? Meet with Comptel in Barcelona to learn more about My Digital Moments and our full portfolio of customer engagement solutions. Email [email protected] to arrange a meeting.