With 85% of US residents owning mobile phones, the market is fast approaching saturation. Service providers are shifting from a revenue growth strategy primarily focused on selling to new customers to retaining existing customers. To do this, telcos are embracing the concept of building lifelong customers with the goal to become the ‘lifelong provider’ for these valued subscribers. How are they achieving this?
In order to win over their customers for life, they’ll have to focus on a myriad of strategies all focused on the customer experience. Making them happier will help achieve a longer customer lifespan. To do so, you’ll have to cater to their wants and interests through a number of approaches:
Personalization
Today’s customers expect the brands they engage with to provide highly personalized interactions and experiences; in fact, 59% of customers say personalization influences their purchase decisions.
Using Localytics, telcos are able to create personal, meaningful, and contextual customer engagements. With first party data, they can identify and execute opportunities for cross-app engagement, cross-selling, and cross-adoption. Third party operator data gets correlated against first party data to help telcos compete with experiences such as those provided by Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. With geolocation data, viewing habits, and behaviors interacting with video and non-video content, telcos are building new service offerings that feel personalized to customers and drive engagement.
Improved omnichannel experiences
As customers have become accustomed to having omnichannel options with other brands, they expect the same from their telco providers. Mobile apps, web, email—they expect to engage with brands across devices and formats without interruption. Every touchpoint and every step of the customer journey has to be visible to providers and seamless to customers.
Using Localytics, telcos are able to bring all their customer data into a single view, and map customer journeys to create personalized offers and services. Using digital intelligence, telcos craft the contextual engagements that resonate with customers. This increases loyalty and retention.
More self service
Customers value self service options that give them greater control and flexibility over account management and engagement preferences. The ability to self serve new plan features, upgrade or downgrade bandwidth requirements, or control notification cadences, gives customers the freedom to manage their experience.
Telcos are using Localytics’s powerful APIs to exchange required data between customer apps and OSS/BSS systems, and leveraging customer-facing apps to enable customers to purchase additional GBs on their data plans, or acquire a roaming package to schedule a field technician visit to their home or business.
Self service as a means to greater customer engagement can also reduce call center OPEX by up 25-30% and it can also increase ARPU.
Improve customer experience and mitigate churn
As important as it is to improve customer experience, it’s equally important for telcos to be able to identify churn risk and reduce it. In fact, by reducing churn rates by 3 to 5 points, telcos can save millions of dollars. (One Localytics customer has saved more than $3.5M per month.)
One way providers are doing this is by using Localytics’ Churn Buster solution, which enables telcos to be proactive and prescriptive about churn. This platform tracks and monitors subscriber behavior and then applies machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict churn. Using service provider data, (like historic churn data, dropped call rates, traffic congestion, or even quality of experience), Localytics can determine a customer’s propensity to churn. This gives telcos the ability to take action ahead of time and address the issues to win customers back.
Build lifelong customers through lifelong value
Telcos that create personalized, seamless omnichannel experiences, with self-service capabilities deliver the customer experiences customers expect today that ultimately, reduce churn and improve loyalty.