Relevant personalized offers improve the experience

The end is near. No, not that end. The end is near for the experimentation phase of customer intelligence and personalized marketing.

Consumers have been patient with communications service providers’ (CSPs’) early attempts at targeted marketing and usage-based profiling used for time and location-sensitive outreach. But with life during a pandemic and likely beyond suddenly becoming fully digital, operators must deliver timely, relevant and easy-to-consume offers or risk losing customers to companies that do.

Taking on a fully digital lifestyle changes one’s view of what matters in terms of customer satisfaction. As users become more engaged and engrossed in their digital lifestyles, they see communications services less as a commodity and more as an experience. Delivering and supporting services as an experience is a big change for CSPs. TM Forum’s research finds they are reorganizing, transforming and enhancing customer experience, reskilling IT organizations, and infusing the entire business with a focus on experience metrics.

Nearly 70% of operators said they have executive ownership over the management of customer experience, with 29% saying they have one executive owner for end-to-end customer experience.

Most CSPs have created mobile apps for self-care, purchasing and product information. While such apps are necessary, they have not moved the needle by themselves on improving customer experience or driving revenue.

What to do?

So, what will it take for CSPs to support their customers’ increasingly digital lifestyle with the launch of personalized, timely, easy to procure offers? In a word, transformation. More specifically, they must focus on:

• Speeding the innovation process


• Streamlining the number of products and their options within a catalog


• Automating the distribution of new product offers as well as retirement of products that are no longer used


• Better use of data from internal and external sources, which requires advanced analytics


• Broadening the scope of marketing to include the entire sales channel


• Getting smarter about customer acquisition, which means segmenting customers to know who to target and who to ignore in order to lower the cost of acquisition


• Presenting a seamless buying experience for customers


• Leveraging social media but being wary of it too

Personalization done right has already proved effective. Almost one-third of operators say personalization has increased sales and/or loyalty substantially (see below.) However, personalization will be one of those functions in need of continuous refinement.

When it comes to the infrastructure to support a customer-centric approach, 84% of respondents to a recent TM Forum survey said at least half of their IT infrastructure will transition to a cloud native architecture within the next three years. Given the expectations for edge computing and the need for data sovereignty, the analytics associated with personalization may also need to reside at the edge.