Delivering Trust for Risk-Aware Telcos - Using Data and Analytics

Trust lies at the heart of all successful long-term interactions – regardless of the sector. Telecommunication businesses are fighting hard with acquisition campaigns in a bid to win more trust, more business and new customers. But at the same time, consumers are keen to believe that their investment in time and money will help yield the very best experience available. Telecommunication businesses need to make the most of the real-time risk-aware insights and the mass of alternative data available. It’s a route to ensuring they consistently design digital offers around the customer to continually create trust, security, and far better experiences.

Even if they’re appealing to younger demographics, those with lean credit histories and so-called ‘thin-files’, success hinges on the perception of trust, security, appropriate risk-aware offers and the quality of customer experience. Telecom industry winners and top performers are always willing to invest to ensure they make their customer promise profitable.

Telcos and the Need for Risk-Aware Persona-Based Acquisition

The ability to deliver risk-aware, pre-screened customer offers in near-to real-time is everything for telcos. But it’s all about trust. By moving beyond the current one-size-fits-all approach, telecom operators can customise the user experience by identifying user personas and applying an analytical overlay to their customer data assets, to continually deliver critical insight and targeted customized experiences. Demographic cohort data can also be used as part of risk-aware acquisition campaigns, to hyper-personalize persona-based engagement for telcos.

Pre-Emptive Risk-Aware Product Offers Informed By The Most Accurate Data Sets

Given the mass of data available, there’s a temptation to pay for everything going. But it’s simply unnecessary. In today’s markets, providers can opt to reduce their costs by making customer decisions based on the most accurate data sets only. It drives a ‘just-in-time’ mindset towards delivering greater security with real-time, fully risk-aware and pinpoint-perfect customer acquisition offers. It also helps telecom operators stay on the right side of data regulations, asset security and steer clear of the risk of data breaches by only retaining a minimal volume of customer information. Waterfall decisioning that only requires data pulls, as needed, also reduces storage and data costs.

Smart Contracting, Faster Acquisition and Consumer-Initiated Pre-Qualification

Telecom customers routinely highlight choppy subscription processes as a key driver of low net-promoter scores and non-renewals - both of which contribute to high churn rates. Reduce this threat with a more sophisticated platform approach helping reduce manual reviews, automate more processes and create a more efficient onboarding process.

Some companies attempt to mask sluggish acquisition experiences by embedding them in the buying process. But telecoms can streamline contracts by encouraging consumer-initiated pre-qualification for initial purchases and auto-renewal notifications with pre-programmed dates and pricing. Customers with thin files can also be onboarded with alternative offers or repayment plans. Online pre-qualification provides consumers with credit transparency to better understand what they can or can’t afford.

Putting a Risk-Aware Lens on Inflation and Rising Living Costs

Dealing with inflation, rising living costs and the squeeze on household income are front-of-mind for many right now. Whether that’s making more efficient risk decisions at the point of sale, managing the customer base effectively, or even managing overheads to keep costs reigned in. Telcos are trying to figure out what to do and are realising they haven’t invested sufficiently in customer awareness surrounding risk, or risk management technology that is both agile and flexible. For instance, many telcos haven’t invested in any collections decisioning systems, or even a collections workflow tool. Instead, many have some basic treatment paths hard coded into their CRM, which can also take up to nine months to make changes. 

The squeeze on household incomes is also now having a huge impact on consumer behavior and spending. Telecommunication, in common with all lenders, know they’re operating in a highly aggressive market – but want successful risk-aware, customer acquisition programmes to retain and grow market share, while maximizing profit. Success in retaining markets share while staying profitable hinges on carefully planning and optimizing their acquisition strategies from the outset.

Monitoring customer value, before automatically determining the right action for each customer, with a combination of advanced analytics, multiple data sets and informed insight, will help ensure the right action - every time. Clearly, customers’ needs can change in an instant. But Telcos’ positions can be safeguarded from these threats by developing a sophisticated, real-time risk-aware view of account performance that drives the right action at any given moment, while supporting customers, and balancing portfolio risk and profitability.

How FICO Is Helping

Embarking on two-way digital dialogue with customers will always pay dividends. It will increase a company’s understanding of their customer’s behaviour, while enabling the business to rapidly evolve its digital capability, and become ever-more friction-free with expected ease of use and transparency of messaging. Promoting simple self-service with an omnichannel approach results in happier customers, measured by significant complaint reduction, while the containment rate of customers who complete self-service payments continues to increase.

It's a process that's underpinned by FICO Platform, which also enables so-called “just-in-time” data acquisition. By only buying the data needed on each customer as needed and when needed, providers win a cost-efficient competitive advantage thanks to agile, flexible development and production environments that allow for rapid deployment, continuous learning cycles and streaming analytics. It ensures the right offer is always delivered to the right consumer every time.

FICO Platform also lends itself to joining informed, fully risk-aware acquisition decisions across the lifecycle and across multiple use cases. These include originating and onboarding, risk management, loyalty and retention, debt management and collections, fraud, margin assurance, value management and customer care. At FICO, we continually help our Telco clients ensure they have the best tools to underpin their risk-aware acquisition strategies. To deliver these types of programs, operators need to be sure that they apply the appropriate analytics to understand customers at a granular level, as well as understanding the overall make-up of their portfolios.

• Click here to read Does Your Omnichannel Strategy Offer Customers What They Want?
• Read Should You Open Your Wallet for Omnichannel?
• Click here to read Communications: Multi-Channel vs. Omni-Channel
• Read more about pursuing growth opportunities with a streamlined risk-tolerant platform.