Social Networks form naturally among users of communications technology and a pretty nifty new analysis tool from Aperio CI helps operators identify and evaluate the propensities within these groups in order to prevent churn and provide intelligent marketing.
The company’s Social Network Analysis and Propensities (SNAP) application, released today, is a software-based analytics tool ─ initially for mobile operators ─ that gauges customer behavior and preferences through the analysis of billing records, customer information and history, and competitive pricing information.
“We don’t just crank out data; we provide the understanding of what it means,” said Paul King, president of Aperio CI, a privately held company from Ronkonkoma, N.Y.
Aperio CI’s technology reminds us that social networking is a naturally occurring phenomenon and long before Internet companies such as MySpace and Facebook co-opted the term, there was an inherent avenue for understanding one’s customers just waiting to be leveraged. The SNAP tool ends that wait by identifying informal social networks of users among an operator’s customer base and evaluating their patterns of usage and technology adoption.
SNAP employs data analytics to examine how users interact with one another and calculates the influence they have on other customers in terms of products and services, customer service, brand loyalty, and overall satisfaction. SNAP categorizes users into traits such as Deciders (typically the bill payer), Connectors (people in a calling circle), and Influencers (early adopter and terminators), then assigns degrees of risk and value to each category. It offers clear action items for operators to deliver compelling and relevant offers and communications through specific channels to appropriate social network group members.
"In our recent study of advanced data analytics, Stratecast noted slightly more emphasis on customer retention in 2008 marketing campaigns, as compared to 2007. This is a smarter use of money. At the same time, we see network operators using data from more sources, in an effort to make their campaign models more sophisticated, more predictive,” said Susan McNeice, global program manager of OSS/BSS Competitive Strategies at Stratecast. “Aperio CI's SNAP offering plays quite well into that desire by the operators to understand what, or in this case who, is an influencer of a consumer's spending behavior."
Contrary to current thinking, Aperio CI helps make the case that an operator’s most valuable customer might not be the one generating the most revenue. It replaces ARPU (average revenue per user) with something it calls Connected Value. This examines the revenue generated by a subset of social network members, to quantify a customer’s true value. It shows how Influencers within a social network might have a substantially higher value to an operator than a customer who spends twice as much each month, based on the number of other users he or she may influence.
