Apertio Survey Asks What it Takes to ‘Own’ the Customer

Seventy-four service providers around the world acknowledge they “feel the heat” from Internet, media, and entertainment companies getting into data-centric and IP-based services. Participants in the 2008 Apertio Subscriber Intelligence Survey acknowledged that Internet companies currently lead in terms of “nurturing” customers and personalizing services. But, telcos trump Internet companies in infrastructure and service delivery.

Of the 74 global operators surveyed, 58 percent were mobile operators, 28 percent were converged operators and 10 percent were fixed line operators. The remaining 4 percent were MVNOs. For these respondents, convergence and subscriber intelligence across their networks was deemed  “critical” to fuelling plans for customer-centric service delivery.

The 2008 survey is a follow-up to last year’s research on consolidating data. It clearly demonstrates operators plan to monetize data once it is consolidated. The director-level marketing and technology representatives in the survey indicated they plan to consolidate subscriber data to derive customer profiles that will drive personalized, dynamic services. In fact, 62 percent of those surveyed said that in the next 12 to 24 months, they will start consolidating data in order to exploit real-time services.

To truly “own” the customer, operators acknowledged they must personalize services.
When asked about the main drivers/revenue opportunities for IP and data services to mobile users over the next 24-36 months, 67 percent of respondents cited “personalization of services.” The operators suggested that being “smarter” was more important than being “just faster.”

“Respondents realize that profiling of travel patterns, channel preferences, key words used, spending habits and even presence data will have to be used to create ‘customer profiles’ for highly personalized services,” says Rick Halton, director of directory product line management at Apertio. He notes 76 percent of respondents saw “customer profiling” as the most relevant area for subscriber intelligence strategies going forward.

In the survey, the “key attributes” of improved subscriber intelligence will include customer profiling and ID management. This suggests that operators understand the value of robust customer profiles, which would be repositories in which data is unified, as opposed to residing in far-flung, incongruous databases throughout networks.

More than 50 percent of those surveyed indicated all aspects of subscriber management, apart from roaming services, would be relevant to subscriber intelligence. The most relevant areas of subscriber intelligence were identified as customer profiling of customer behavior; management of identities — particularly where numerous services bind third-party offerings — and service personalization for monetizing customer data.