How to use GenAI to create and manage intent-based customer offers

Commercial context

As the digital services market turns increasingly to generative AI (GenAI) to rapidly develop and deploy personalized customer offers, communications service providers (CSPs) have an opportunity to improve customer experience, while raising sales revenue, and containing the costs of managing increasing complexity from mass customization. This need arises in part from growing pressure on CSPs to develop customized, scalable offers that can quickly adapt to evolving market demands.

By integrating AI into their back-end commercial catalog processes, CSPs can also quickly audit and rationalize large sets of offers and establish an optimal, standardized catalog structure. This capability allows them to create new offers based on the most effective structures and pricing models, leading to significant cost savings and increased profitability. The commercial implications for how CSPs deliver offers to customers are profound, as this integration enables enterprises to accelerate their time-to-market, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive sales growth.

The solution

The AI-driven offer lifecycle management Catalyst is developing a solution that uses GenAI for real-time, dynamic offer personalization and catalog simplification. Its personalization capabilities dynamically assemble personalized offers and pricing in real-time, based on a prospect or customer’s specific context and needs. By using data such as expressed needs, context, and previous interactions, the AI tailors offers to each individual and scores each offer's potential for success, continuously improving the customer offer. The AI also analyzes the performance of specific offers, assessing whether the commercial intents defined at the initial stages of the offer lifecycle are being met. Based on this assessment, the AI identifies the offers that can be simplified or retired, enabling CSPs to make fast and accurate decisions regarding the subsequent stages of an offer’s lifecycle. This rationalization is critical for maintaining a streamlined and effective offer portfolio across the various brands serviced by each CSP.

A key aim of the solution is to enhance the customer’s satisfaction through more personalized offers and experiences. In future, the solution will enable CSPs to identify the next best options to substitute offers they cannot deliver and map the next best investments in infrastructure, thereby prioritizing both capital and operational spending. The solution employs various TM Forum standards, including TMF 921A for commercial intent information, TMF648 for quote management, TMF637 for product inventory management, and TMF622 for product ordering management. These standards ensure compatibility and consistency across the different aspects of offer lifecycle management.

Wider application and value

Through AI-assisted offer personalization, the Catalyst has the potential to set the industry standard for how CSPs can engage with prospects and customers through personalized experiences to create tailored offers in real-time. The project team estimates that this AI-based approach can reduce the time and costs for creating and delivering hyper-personalized customer offers by up to 95%, drive sales conversion rates by 10-30%, and improve customer satisfaction (as measured by net promoter score) by 5-15%.

CSP marketing and business teams can subsequently use these tools to automate large-scale, one-to-one marketing campaigns, aligning closely with business goals and strategies. This automation leads to significant cost efficiencies and revenue growth, as broader, richer propositions can be developed, including non-telco components (e.g. financial services), and new business models can be designed to meet changing market demands, all while achieving predefined commercial KPIs.

Similarly, AI-assisted catalog simplification provides CSP commercial operations teams profound benefits, such as smart rationalization and simplification of commercial portfolios. By creating a standardized and optimized catalog structure across all brands, service providers can significantly reduce the time and effort required for rationalization, especially during major transformations like mergers and acquisitions. The automated simplification process can achieve complexity reduction by up to a factor of 20, further minimizing time-to-market for new offers. This also results in a leaner, more manageable catalog that is easier for sales staff to present and sell.

According to Patricia Ventura Gomez, Global CTIO Head of Channels & Customer Engagement for Telefónica, “this Catalyst marks a significant advancement from predictive AI, which processes data to forecast future outcomes, to GenAI capable of creating unique offers for each customer, at scale. GenAI can design new personalized offers and business models in real time, ultimately achieving the goal of true AI-driven lifecycle management.”

To learn more about how this Catalyst is providing CSPs with a way to understand customer intent and tailor offers accordingly using GenAI, please see the project space on the TM Forum website here.