‘Telecom business environment evolving at a fast pace’
By: Hina Mahgul Rind
KARACHI: The telecommunications business environment in Pakistan is evolving at a fast pace, creating the need for new and innovative business models. Service providers are facing significant business challenges on various fronts, increased competition locally and globally, erosion of customers loyalty due to commoditisation of services and decreasing margins for traditional service offerings, Kaleem Chaudhry, regional director of Enterprise Technology, Oracle Asia Pacific, said while talking to The News.
To compete in this new business environment, service providers must transform their businesses to meet the new market demands, he said.
Monolithic construct of traditional IT infrastructure and solutions are incapable of handling this large set of unstructured, high speed, complex and yet valuable data streams, he said, adding that is where a dedicated big data platform is required to address and extract valuable business insights from this haystack of data for future growth.
Big data offers an organisation an investment into future revenue potential, he said.
IT solutions such as big data and analytics can be leveraged by telecom players to discover new ways to strategise, plan, optimise business operations and capture new market opportunities.
Future ready technology solutions being offered by leading vendors such as Oracle allow the telecom companies to maximise customers’ value, enhancing business agility and maximising profitability, he added.
New technologies such as Near Field Contact (NFC), provides huge opportunity for evolved products and services, Chaudhry said, adding that the telecommunication operators can service the entire value chain.
Big data solutions can provide the propensity of such service consumers accurately in shortest possible time, he said.
Leveraging big data platform can provide edge to the telecom service providers over competition by being nimble and agile in decision making.
As the leading solutions provider for communications market, Oracle is committed to helping service providers transform meet the key business objectives and provide a complete solution portfolio spanning the entire communications systems landscape.
Chaudhry said: “Telecom operators capture trillions of bytes of unstructured information about their customers, suppliers and operations. Millions of networked sensors are also being embedded in the physical world in devices such as mobile phones and automobiles; sensing, creating, and communicating data at very high speeds.”
“Multimedia and individuals with smart phones are active on social network sites and are further fuelling the exponential growth in data. This large pool of information can be captured, aggregated, stored and analysed as part of every sector and function of the global economy. Here’s where the spectrum of big data comes into play.”
For the telecom operators, analysing this diverse and unformatted digital data streams can reveal new sources of economic value and provide fresh insights into customers’ behaviour. They can track conversations on social media such as Twitter and Facebook to understand what customers are saying about their products and services and take proactive measures to defend their brand image and reputation, Chaudhry said.
They can also look at a possibility of business hypothesis testing by digging deeper into this unstructured pool of information and analysing them against existing business warehouse data with accuracy, he said.
A recent study done by a market research firm concluded that profitability potential of an organisation increases with a unit reduction in forecasting errors. One of the major reasons of forecasting error is due to omissions of valuable information, while performing analysis. Big data solutions provide effective levers to avoid such costly omissions and analyse data holistically, it said.
Big data also offers opportunities to gain cross-channel insights. By analysing transactional data at each level of engagement with the customers (from the first click on the operator’s website to search for a service – to the interaction with a customer care executive – to final purchase or non-purchase), operators can gauge if the customer’s experience was seamless and if not, then how can they improve the process.
The telecom operators can find new sources of revenue by collecting and analysing location data to determine target segments and product profitability margins, prior to offer conceptualisation. This would help improve the efficacy of marketing and advertising spends.
Big data can also allow operators to decide how to address customers angst in the face of a network failure. Network analysis can also be used to offer personalised promotions to customers based on their usage, Chaudhry said.
Oracle has a suite of end-to-end solutions for advance and complex analytics to help the telecom operators make the best use of Big data and transform the way they engage with the customer and the way they operate.
Telecom companies have been in the forefront of practicing Business Intelligence for decision support. Traditionally, the operators who have mature Business Intelligence platforms have tapped into varied data sets within the Network and Switching Subsystems (NSS) / Operation and Support Subsystem (OSS) / Base Station Subsystem (BSS) landscapes and processed and enriched the information to bring in Business Intelligence to the management.
With the advent of Big Data and the importance given to it by analysts and IT professionals, the operators are now faced with challenges on how Big Data can be encompassed in the Business Intelligence landscapes to improve the richness of the delivery.
The need for third party data for decision support: The operators are looking at ways to tap third party data for decision support. A wealth of information is available in data residing ‘outside’ the telecom operators information landscape, ie, competitor activity logs, competitor messaging, competitor campaigns and customer and competitor interactions.
Third party data also encompasses information arising out of political, economical, social, technological, legal and environmental engagements. Acquiring this data and combining it with the structured data set already available in the telecom DWH, pose another significant challenge.
The need to tap into activities on social networks: The general public is choosing social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter to post comments, discuss benefits or disadvantage of services or complain about poor customers experience instead of getting in touch with the telecom operators directly.
For the telecom companies, tapping into this space is becoming almost mandatory because if they don’t, an opportunity to understand what customers (and competitor’s customers) ‘feel’ about their service offerings in a timely manner will be lost.
A telecom player can also analyse the sentiments around its brand and design their integrated marketing programmes for optimum efficacy. Many big brands have launched their Facebook pages and Twitter handles to engage with their customer base and create brand resonance, Chaudhry added.
Source: The News
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