Spotlight on AI and Analytics | TelecomDrive.com
When it comes to driving innovation with AI and Analytics, Comviva has been at the forefront and helping its global customers reinvent monetization possibilities and delivering unique experience for their end customers.
With the help of its latest innovative offerings such as BlueMarble and MobiLytix – Comviva is supporting major telcos to improve their customer experience journeys for increased revenues and customer retention.
As part of our Disruptive Telecoms initiative, Amit Sanyal, EVP & Chief Operating Officer, Customer Value Solutions, Comviva interacts with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com on how the company is driving innovation for telecoms with the help of AI and Analytics.
How is AI and Analytics currently contributing to enable a sophisticated customer experience management for telcos?
Data science and AI have become vital to the telecom sector and becoming more so as the industry evolves with time. With the steadily increasing use of smartphones and other connected mobile devices, the amount of data flowing through telecom operator networks has increased and the network operations, customer service operations, and infrastructure operations of telecom companies all generate massive amounts of data. AI and ML is going to revolutionise customer experience and uplift revenues significantly more than any other factor in telecom put together. One big play that AI and analytics currently has, and which is expected to continue for the next five to seven years, is personalization at scale.
As the technology evolves and we enter the next phase, the telcos are able to make personalized recommendations based on a user’s behavioural patterns and content preferences. AI and analytics is also helping in detecting and fixing potential issues for customers even before they’re apparent to the end-user, therefore leading to more personalized experience for every telco customer.
What are the different areas where AI and analytics can be leveraged by telecom companies?
The telecommunications industry has gone through several stages of automation. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics has been clearly advancing and has recently picked up pace in the telecommunications market. Communication service providers (CSPs) are using AI and analytics to examine their massive amounts of data and derive actionable insights that can lead to improvements in customer experience, loyalty, and ARPU, increasing their profitability, improving customer satisfaction, and increasing efficiency, particularly by detecting issues and recommending the best course of action before they affect customers as well as increased efficiencies. AI is heavily used now in telecom for channel management, field force optimization. On the network side, for predictive fault finding, self-healing network, software defined networks.
According to me, some of the major use cases of AI and analytics in the telcos business are
- Improvement in customer experience
- Monetization of existing telco assets
- Decluttering
AI and analytics is helping revolutionise telco operators and reinventing monetization possibilities for CSPs. The next phase is now on application of data analytics into revolutionary business outcomes or towards customer experience, asset monetization and decluttering. Machine learning and AI will be hugely useful in personalization at scale and decluttering which means the relevant communications will be disseminated to relevant customers at the relevant time.
Customer experience has become a top priority for telcos in the recent times. What are some of the solutions provided by Comviva to help move telcos transition beyond traditional network connectivity?
Comviva has been behind telecom revolutions of multiple regions across the world. We have been supporting major telcos to improve their customer experience journeys for increased revenues and customer retention. One of our majorly adopted solutions is BlueMarble which is a modular commerce, order management, customer care and partner management digital platform.
The end-to-end digital transformation stack of this solution is helping operators navigate smoother digital transformation journeys. Specifically designed for Communication Service Providers (CSPs), it is a 5G ready, cloud-native, microservices based, open and digital platform that delivers business agility to rapidly offer personalized customer experiences and journey. Our solutions are being leveraged by customers like TATA Sky, Airtel, Vodafone Idea in India and many such prominent CSPs across the world.
MobiLytix is another leading marketing technology platform globally that unifies customer engagement, loyalty & rewards management, data science and intelligent AI-driven automation capabilities within a single platform to execute campaigns real-time and at scale. By engaging customers with the right message, at the right time, across any channel, organizations can improve customer experience, increase customer lifetime value, and drive revenue growth. With over 200 million deployed customer base and clients achieving high incremental revenues, MobiLytix™ has a proven track record of customer success.
What are the key enablers for traditional CSPs to move towards a more digitalized infrastructure?
Enabled by 5G deployments, increased cloud adoption, and higher uptake of AI, Metaverse & Edge, the telecom industry is entering into an era of accelerated change. New waves of technology, new ways of working, and new ways of engaging with customers will drive the next wave of business value creation, bringing about unprecedented change, opportunity, and threat.
Service providers have previously sailed through various transformations and emerged much stronger than ever before. Even today, CSPs that reimagine the customer experience, restructure their business model, and rethink their technological foundation are more likely to ride the budding next digital wave.
Key enablers that CSPs may immediately align to are:
- AI / ML modelling based customer journey management at each customer interaction point
- Digital touch points & incentives to drive digital interactions
- Data Lakes for mass data aggregation
- Review the need and implement a Customer Data Platform for a 360 Degree customer view in a single consolidated platform.
New-age technology has enabled industries to revolutionize their business models and solutions? What are some of the challenges that AI and Data Analytics can help CSPs to address?
AI and analytics will be able to declutter the telco’s interaction with the customer, which means the number of communications is dramatically reduced, which will also reduce the load on the telcos internal systems and create bandwidth to do proper service. Telcos with significant investment in AI and ML have also been able to significantly reduce their cost of operations.
The number of telephone subscribers witnessed a decline to 1,170 million in October, as against 1,171.92 million in September, thereby showing a monthly decline rate of 0.12%, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The importance of customer retentivity has increased by many times as nearly all firms started losing their consumers due various reasons and as empirically known with the fact that customer acquisition is pricier event. AI and analytics is one such technology which can propel the customer experience and help telcos retain their customers.
The interview is published as part of January 2023 issue of Disruptive Telecoms.
