Communications Service Providers’ priorities shift as customer engagement comes to the fore

Evolving Systems, Inc., a leader in real-time digital engagement solutions and services, anticipates shifting priorities for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in 2020. With Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest annual gathering of key decision-makers happening this month in Barcelona, Evolving Systems’ leaders attending the event expect a number of pressing issues to be discussed.

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Matthew Stecker, CEO, Evolving Systems, notes: “2020 will be challenging for CSPs as traditional end-user expectations are being re-set and as a result of the resulting changing requirements, internal support infrastructures are being redrawn. At Evolving Systems, we know better than anyone how state-of-the-art loyalty programs work and what they can deliver in the telco industry. Those carriers who are driving innovation in their relationships with customers in this highly competitive market will be the industry leaders in the coming year. This is a subject we expect to see being debated at Mobile World Congress!”

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The trends we will see are:

The arrival of Customer Engagement 3.0

Evolving Systems believes that the nature of customer engagement will change as personalization – how marketing and customer value management actually engage with subscribers – rapidly matures. This means a change will be required in legacy solution architectures (i.e. a move from the relational database of static customer data to real-time online customer profiling). Those carriers who lead the way will tap the real benefits that can be achieved by moving to CE 3.0.

Subscribers’ perception of value will change

Net Promoter Scores in the telecoms industry are low; yet to date there’s been relatively little analysis as to why. 2020 will see a more forensic examination of this question, with facts starting to outstrip rhetoric. One change lies in clearer answers to the question “Does my operator give me value for my money?” Another will be to better understand global trends such as the price of data, where new approaches to pricing differs widely between geographic regions.

Artificial Intelligence evolves from headline maker to decision maker

The difference between Deep Learning, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence remains poorly articulated and perhaps also poorly understood. All three phrases are widely used by CSPs, but what they actually mean and are being used for is far less clear. 2020 will more clearly define the practical uses of AI….and more effectively start to answer questions such as “Can/should I trust a machine to determine what price to offer a customer for my services?”

New Best Practices for churn emerge

Can CSPs realistically employ usage data and trends to predict whether a customer will churn? Can the real drivers of churn be isolated and articulated? If they can, then the causes of churn can be fixed, for instance by triggering personalized discount offers. 2020 may finally see the emergence of new industry best practices for scoring customer churn risks.

Time to Know Your Customer…better

KYC will start to be more prevalent in markets globally. Most of Africa and Europe already have KYC or some form of registration implemented, with India and the Middle East also being KYC markets. It will proliferate more into other geographies such as LATAM and Asia in 2020.

5G: Mobile competes with home broadband

5G will apply more to developed markets but will still fall into the ‘all you can eat’ trap. It will be pushed as a premium service based on increased speeds. This will open opportunities for mobile operators to take on the home broadband market in 2020.

Next year, the new party will be around the third party

Customer retention will become more and more important but the way the customer is retained will no longer be primarily through simply offering telecom services but instead via combining those with non-telecom services and third-party offers. Partner enablement will become table stakes for success.

Telco business models diversify as profits become less and less about telco-sourced revenues

See above! MNOs in particular will be more focused on content and selling other product/services with a significant chunk of revenue coming from non-telco partners. This will vary by region but the larger players in each market will have started to diversify their business models by the end of next year.

Watch out for the Enterprise boom

The enterprise market segment will be a major source of growth for M(V)NOs in 2020, with IoT being at the forefront of driving this change.

Ultimately 2020 will be a year for heightened focus on Customer Engagement as end-user expectations shift and increase.

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