Big Data technologies, cloud services and price drops in storage disks have made it possible to store huge datasets. Now companies can keep hundreds of terabytes and even petabytes of data forever. But what is the benefit of keeping all this data, especially for telecom operators? Is there a real returnon all this investment?
Here are three reasons why customer data could be a gold mine.
1. Understand the past
This is a no-brainer: keeping historical data enables companies to understand the past. For operators this means being able to faster diagnose outages and therefore help a call center be more efficient.
The time-to-resolution or TTR is one of the key metrics call centers follow closely and TTR is directly related to customer satisfaction.The faster the time to resolution of a call, the more satisfied the client.
Keeping historical data on all customers can therefore clearly help with better TTR indicators. By accessing historical data on a client, customer service operators can see when problems have occurred in the past: dropped connections, macro blocks, memory leaks, Wi-Fi configuration issues, interferences…
Most of the time, a client who experiences intermittent internet connection drops has no problem when he calls the call center. In which case, the call center operator will have difficulty understanding the issue. The client is frustrated and the TTR is long. With historical data, the problem would have been easily identified. The historical data helps to qualify the level of incident the client is experiencing and decrease TTR.
2. Understand the evolution
In understanding evolution patterns, moving average variations and peak data changes are essential. Historical data enables the tracking ofimprovement over time which gives key insights. These insights are essential for driving a business.
Marketers are always on the run to better understand and segment the customers. Keeping historical data can help marketers understand iftheir customer segment is changing. Thus help them adapting to their customers with new offers.
For example, having a concrete understanding of historical and present VoD usage and the variation, service providers can increase the resources for each service so that the quality experience remains good.
3. Enable forecasting
Big data technology makes it possible to analyse past data to forecast future events. But to do so, the forecasting algorithms rely on large historical data sets. Thus storing historical data is a prerequisite.
Based on billions of calculations and data points over the past events, big data now makes it possible to forecast and predict events.Knowing the weather for the next days or predicting the consumer behaviour becomes easy.
For example, for Telecom Operators this means taking advantage of this technology to be proactive in problem resolution. Predicting if in the future a customer’s television broadcast will fail based on macro block variation calculations.
These 3 key points are the main reasons why service providers should keep their historical data as soon as possible, in order to be able to provide higher quality service and appropriate offers to their clients, now and in the future.
Bora Kizil is CEO of Ezako, an AI graduate from Dauphine University, Paris, and ex-Director of Rocket Internet