How Telcos Are Increasing CLV With Better Personalization and CX

Telcos battle it out in increasingly competitive market

The saturated telcom market has been shifting as large telcos buy up smaller companies and set their sites on locking in customers and decreasing churn. After all, with the cost of acquisition typically being much higher than the cost of retention, there's plenty of incentive to get it right. How are they doing it? For many, it's by offering the trifecta of telco products: internet, TV and mobile.

Major telcos intent on increasing retention by converting their customers to the whole package are at an advantage with the wealth of customer data they already have. Instead of pitching a mobile phone subscription to an unknown prospect, they have an entire base of internet and cable customers just waiting to be converted. Not only do these telco giants know their prospects' contact information, they have the potential to understand their preferences and needs in a way the competition just can't. 

But in order to deliver on high consumer expectations and offer a seamless customer experience, telcos need to combine their fragmented data sources and use it as fuel to predict and anticipate customer needs. 

In working with telcos in this phase, we see them using technology to tackle 3 main challenges in order to ultimately improve customer lifetime value (CLV): 

1. ID management across platforms 
2. Upsell/cross-sell at the right time in the right place to lock-in customers
3. Aggregate data sources to improve the customer experience

ID management across platforms and channels

For any businesses looking to improve personalization and customer experience, it is essential to first be able to identify customers across platforms and websites.
 
The gap between having data and organizing that data can be monumental — let alone bridging the next gap to activating the data (more on that later). Particularly for large telcos that are juggling multiple products, subscription services and platforms, aggregating data sources can be a huge challenge. 
 
For starters, these businesses have a vast array of data sources: 

Website(s)               Brick and mortar locations

Customer details   2nd party data sources  

Behavioral data      3rd party data sources 

Call center              Email  

Teams across the entire organization must have access to this data in order to offer a comprehensive customer experience. Sales, marketing, customer service — each of these departments stand to benefit from a unified customer profile in different ways. Yet too often, this data remains stuck in silos. 

There are many options out there that promise to help companies unify their data, from Data Management Platforms (DMP) and Tag Management Systems (TMS) to Customer Data Platforms (CDP). Each type of technology deals with data a little differently, so it's important to have a clear idea of what you're looking for beyond data unification in order to decide which type of technology will best serve your business now and in the future. 

Improve cross-selling and upselling with 1:1 personalization

Once your data is unified, you can begin to activate it to improve the way you communicate with your customers across platforms and channels. 

In our experience with telecom companies, increasing CLV requires more than personalization based on audience segmentation. It requires one-to-one personalization in real time. Offer each of your customers a journey that adapts to the individual in real time based on their choices and behaviors. 

Let's go back for a minute to our cable and internet subscription customer: 

1. Next month it will be time for them to renew their annual contract. They receive an email from you asking how they're enjoying their service and reminding them it will be time to renew soon. 
2. You know from their customer profile that they have been looking at wifi options on your website. You also know they don't have a wifi booster yet, so you add a link to some suggested content on wifi boosters. 
3. The link goes to a personalized landing page explaining how someone with a home their size can benefit from a booster. 
4. The landing page offers an option to extend their contract now and receive a discount on a wifi booster. 
5. If they didn't renew, they receive another email in a week's time with the offer embedded in the email. 
6. In the meantime, this customer calls customer service with some questions about their cable plan. They just bought a new TV and want to know about the channel packages. 
7. Your customer service representative sees that the customer has recently received an offer for a discounted wifi booster, and based on this, is able to suggest a combination wifi and cable upgrade that would give them an additional 50 channels plus faster wifi for only 10 euros more a month, if they would like to renew their package right now. 

By directly personalizing offers for customers online in real time, you are able to streamline the customer journey by always offering each individual the next best action for them — rather than someone who looks like them. The data is there, you just have to unify it and activate it. 

The journey above might sound like a lot of work, but with Intelligent Journey Orchestration, almost the entire sequence is automated based on preset if/then scenarios. In the end, it nurtured the customer and then put the customer service representative in the perfect position to offer the right upgrade at the right time. 

Enhance the customer experience with true omnichannel

And that's just one single example. Imagine sequencing hundreds of these journeys across channels and touchpoints so that your business always offers the most optimal option at the perfect time. 

In this way, it's easy to see how solving cross-channel ID management and improving the way you upsell and cross-sell through better personalization will naturally lead to an improved customer experience. 

Ultimately, it's all about your customer — and that makes it essential to take an outside-in approach to become and remain relevant for increasingly informed, empowered and demanding customers. You can meet those demands with technology to create meaningful customer dialogues.

The next step is to take your use-case-based approach and tie it together across channels. Read the Practical Guide to Omnichannel Marketing for Telecoms to learn more about orchestrating 1-to-1 journeys in real time across channels in the telecoms industry.