Telecommunications companies are faced with an explosion of varied, high-volume, and high-velocity data streams. To be successful and profitable in this hypercompetitive industry, it’s necessary to orient yourself to the real needs of your customers by making use of your most valuable asset—information.
Using your data effectively is critical in differentiating your offerings and targeting customers more effectively, thereby generating greater customer loyalty, and taking advantage of new business models including partnerships with third-party providers.
Big data applications that are context aware can place you at the heart of the digital value chain. By combining real-time insight (location, interests, and activities) with demographic knowledge like habits and preferences, you can achieve an unparalleled marketing power.
Maximizing the value of data
There are three core ways in which operators can maximize the value of their data:
TARGETING: Use big data to target products and marketing offers to increase loyalty and personalize the user experience according to the customer’s needs.
OPTIMIZING: Use network and IT data to increase operational efficiencies and improve effectiveness of customer experience management. By knowing how the network is used, you can identify where to invest in new capacity, when to make traffic-boosting offers, and how to serve your customers most efficiently.
INNOVATING: Finally, and perhaps the area that generates the most excitement, is the potential that operator data has to enable new business models. The information operators have about their customers has obvious value to third-party and over-the-top service providers, too. This presents a means by which you can insert your organization in the digital value chain and be more than a network infrastructure provider. Operators shouldn’t just keep on investing more in the network; if you want to prove your value to your partners, you need to know your subscribers better.
Managing the complexity
Within the telecommunications industry, big data is much deeper than in any other industry because of the volumes of structured and unstructured data involved. The operators’ challenge is to perform real-time analysis and act on it to drive profits. The structured data that operators collect amounts to millions of transactions and is the information that they have used to run their businesses for many years. This area is a familiar territory; however, operators haven’t applied this data to areas outside their traditional operations to generate value so far—either because they don’t see the value or are concerned by privacy governance.
Unstructured data is far more complex and new terrain for operators. There are billions of transactions to take into account, and sources can be as varied as data from office documents, sensors, survey responses, or call center operations. Unstructured information can be used to gain insight into business drivers. Bringing this data together—from structured and unstructured sources—is at the heart of operators’ plans to derive value and generate revenue and differentiation from big data.
Transform your business
The HP Telco Big Data and Analytics solution addresses the needs of telecommunications companies today and prepares them for tomorrow: the need for a proactive strategy, the demand for targeted products and marketing offers, network experience optimization, and the potential for new business models.
HP solutions look at the network and identify what a customer is doing and then combines that with demographic information about the subscriber and eventually with social media information—if the subscriber authorized the operator to collect that data. This provides real-time insight into what the customer is interested in and what they are doing. Business models associated with that information could be used to help search providers be more effective than they are on their own. It also could be used to target offers to an operator’s own customer through its own portal. Or, it could be used in partnership with third parties to target advertising or products.
A note on security
Due to the sensitivity of the information, respecting the subscriber’s privacy is a key requirement of any solution managing big data. Operators have to guarantee their subscribers that their private data is managed with the appropriate level of confidentiality, anonymized, and protected.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
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