Business intelligence (BI) will play a pivotal role in the success of operators. Integrated BI solutions will not only provide operators real-time intelligence of their customers but also help them to maximize their revenue potential from a short window of opportunity. Integrated BI solutions can potentially help operators address some of their burning issues, such as minimizing fraud and revenue leakage by integrating closely with billing, revenue assurance and mediation platforms; optimizing network resources and offload traffic; and enhancing and customer experience by reducing network outages and keep opex down.
Here are two examples of popular BI applications that can significantly reduce opex/capex and churn.
In the context of fulfillment of NGN services, accurate network capacity planning and trending is becoming critical. On-demand, bandwidth-intensive service requires dynamic, real-time allocation of network resources across the end-to-end network infrastructure. During network infrastructure expansion, the planning organization should be able to carefully target capacity growth to ensure it appropriately addresses current and developing shortfalls. It helps in justifying the need for a less physical build, which directly cuts capex, reducing overhead, saving time on field service, planning and project management.
Real-time BI solutions can play a central role in accurate, realistic and proactive network capacity planning and trending capabilities that will not only enable correct sizing of the future network but will also help CSPs reduce capacity shortfalls, minimize order fallout and increase efficiency by identifying underutilized network resources.
One other important BI use case revolves around the ability to deal with unstructured data. The ability to correlate unstructured response to questions, analysis of call center interactions and additional input sources such as blogs, forums, email, social networking sites, chat, call center transcripts and customer feedback forums helps operators enrich their understanding of their customer and have an understanding of customer perception of their services. BI solutions based on various inputs works through pattern recognition, extraction and various other techniques, thereby adding value to the carrier's BI strategy.