At a time when ARPU is stable or even falling and the cost of signing up new customers is increasing, operators are feeling greater pressure to find new sources of cash flow.
David Grant, Teradata's VP of global industry solutions, believes that one way for carriers to do that is to know more about their existing customers to determine what other products or services to which they are receptive.
This picture is clearest from the perspective of those operating in emerging countries like China and Pakistan, where there is explosive growth. 'There are companies like China Mobile with almost 500 million subscribers, which could easily go to a billion,' Grant said. 'In Pakistan, there's one operator with 100 million subscribers.'
That operator in Pakistan, Grant said, has clients that represent monthly revenues of more than $100 although the average subscriber contributes around $3. Knowing more about these different types of customers through the data warehouse, can help the carrier find out the appropriate service level quality for each segment.
'A customer of $100 per month represents not only 30 times more revenue,' he said. 'In terms of profitability it's much more than that.'
The operator now has to find a way to serve both market segments. Retaining the high-end customers is paramount, but this is also true with the bread-and-butter customers from where the bigger part of growth comes.
'In data warehousing and business intelligence, one of the first things that a carrier would want to do is understand that segmentation,' Grant explained. 'For somebody who brings in $3 a month, he may be using the handset for occasional quick calls. If a call does not go through the first time, there are different expectations from them compared to traveling businesspeople who are going to switch carriers if they can't rely on their network.'
The treatment for the high-end customers could be to direct them to customer-service agents. Meanwhile, economics would suggest that low-end customers would go through the automated service.
And advertising also comes into the picture. 'In this space where many new models are being tested, Teradata offers digital advertising solutions,' Grant said. 'We can take not only what the carrier knows about a subscriber but also match that up with external data coming from behavior website data and other sources to create what we call an audience DNA.'
With data from various sources combined, a carrier that wants to do target advertising may be in a better position to tap a potential new revenue stream and head off the trend of declining revenues from voice services.
Integrating disparate data
With growing piles of in-house customer data, the challenge for the carrier is how to manage and make that useful. For Grant, the key is joining warehouse data with web data in a way that they make sense.
'That can be done by web analytics such as looking at how many visitors came to the carrier's website, what pages they looked at, were there more pages that get looked at today than yesterday,' Grant said. 'And then there's looking at what's the customer behavior through the subscriber data and billing data.'