Hyper-personalization of services through AI and automation is the key to CSP growth

Commercial context

While CSPs currently focus most of their automation efforts on basic tasks and generic solutions, such as chatbots for customer service, the necessary next step is to use their unique datasets to develop more tailored solutions. Advances in both conventional AI and generative AI (genAI) can help CSPs deliver highly personalized experiences, better serve and retain customers, and continually update and enhance their portfolios. By combining the latest cognitive and digital capabilities with customer and operational data, innovative CSPs can also help to reduce their operational costs, while reversing the industry’s stagnant and even declining revenues. “We need to find new ways to monetize our assets,” explains Mohamed Gamal, Head of Capabilities Engineering at stc. “We seek innovation, we want to move away from selling network services, and we know we have an invaluable asset in our data and want to use it to better serve our customers."

The solution

The Realtime intelligent customer experiences Catalyst, which won the 2024 Catalyst Award in the Outstanding Catalyst - Application of AI & Automation category, is showcasing how AI and automation, combined with CSP data, can enable personalized experiences and help to boost digital revenues. To demonstrate how these new technologies can improve customer segmentation and enhance customer support, the Catalyst has built a series of user journeys. These journeys are composed of multiple steps: analyzing changes in a customer’s usage and behavior to forecast how their requirements will change; personalized interactions tailored to customers’ needs; extending a competitive offer to those at risk of churn; automating issue resolution and providing self-healing mechanisms in the event of a service provisioning issue.

The user journeys are enabled by a comprehensive solution developed by the Catalyst, which has integrated a digital billing hub, AI frameworks including a Customer Data Platform driving forecasts, recommendations and knowledge for personalized support, a customer engagement layer, an inventory, order management and proactive detection engine, and real-time digital monetization, technical pricing catalog and network gateways. The cloud-native solution, which follows TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) principles, employs standard APIs for interoperability and to reduce integration risks, and componentization and modularity to quickly build and benefit from different capabilities.

Applications and wider value

The project is designed to showcase how specific digital solutions can quickly make a significant impact on business outcomes. Data-driven and intelligent operations will deliver enhanced customer experiences personally tailored to each subscriber based upon historical behavior, situational awareness, and proactive forecasting of their evolving needs. Testing the Catalyst’s AI-driven forecasting, recommendations and support models against the Project Champions’ real-world but anonymized customer data, the team was able to confirm the accuracy and efficiency of the automation in the solution. Applying those automation gains to the Champions’ business metrics, the team calculated the gains that a CSP can realize through improvements in call handling times, first call deflections, customer satisfaction and sales conversion/revenue gains: €4.3M-€17.2M per annum in Europe, €5.1M-€41.2M in North America, and €1.4M-€4.3M in the Middle East.

As well as delivering compelling individual experiences, hyper-personalization can also support cost reduction use cases, such as revenue assurance and fraud detection, and predictive anomaly detection and capacity management. As digital transformation is an ongoing process, CSPs need to constantly adapt to new trends and customer expectations. The Catalyst is therefore exploring how new technologies will impact numerous roles across the CSP organization. Business stakeholders need to plan for, understand, monitor and measure the impacts of automation and AI systems that will complement their work as CSPs implement real-time operations founded on a broad set of customer and operational data.

“By exploring the real-world impacts of AI-driven processes, we are contributing to Bell Canada’s corporate purpose – to advance how Canadians connect with each other and the world - by simultaneously enhancing customer experiences, striving to grow revenue streams, and optimizing business processes through intelligent automation,” says Justin Morrison, Senior Manager, Technology Services at Bell Canada. “Like many other CSPs, across our business units our teams are dedicated to our strategy of moving from telco to techco. We are transforming and incorporating the latest technologies and applying them to an increasingly robust set of customer, market and operational data. We are thrilled to have worked with an engaged group of partners who embrace an intelligent data-driven communications marketplace.”