Risk-Aware Marketing to Personalize Telco Customer Engagement

Telcos are entering a brave new world of aggressively competitive sales and retention tactics. Innovators are shoring up their market share by opting for cloud-hosted platform technology more typically favoured by banks. A platform approach offers the ability to deploy risk-aware marketing solutions across the customer lifecycle to hyper-personalize customer engagement.

In the telco industry, success often hinges on a continual series of modest steps and small innovations, each building on what has worked before. Market-leading operators are incorporating mathematical optimization and simulation to continually learn and improve their acquisition strategies, customer experience, and customer retention. Hyper-personalization points the path forward for telcos to acquire and win more fully risk-aware businesses to successfully increase growth.

Mastering Acquisition with Risk-Aware ‘What-If’ Scenarios

Simulation and optimization are already in widespread use among banks and financial services companies, often with decisioning logic delivered via a cloud-hosted platform to test multiple ‘what ifs,’ scenarios across the customer journey. It offers the ability to clarify the risk-reward ratios of changes to customer portfolios in a virtual environment and directly informs risk-aware marketing tactics and routes to avoid churn and improve customer retention. By showing the expected impacts of a customer offer change before implementation, optimization gives telecom operators a priceless opportunity to generate business and build customer loyalty, while also lowering their related sales costs and an increase in potential returns.

Proactive Risk-Aware Management is Everything When it Comes to Retention

With the help of cloud-hosted platform architecture, telco companies can consider quickly turning to greater adoption of AI and analytics, to improve acquisition, retention, and service. There are added benefits in that it also helps combine more data siloes, enables providers to leverage more informed insights from all available data sets, and delivers a comprehensive customer view. It's also hugely efficient.

For example, a telco company can prevent valuable customers from churning most effectively by detecting and identifying when customers struggle to pay or are at risk; enabling two-way communications with customers in their preferred digital channels; and creating personalized customer experiences relating to collections that reduce non-payment risks and improve telco customer loyalty and retention.

There’s a mass of customer data available. But as a result, there’s also a temptation to pay for everything going all at once. It’s simply unnecessary. Instead, providers can opt to make a strategic approach by making customer decisions based on the most accurate data sets only. It drives a ‘just-in-time’ mindset towards delivering real-time, fully risk-aware customer acquisition. It also helps telcos stay on the right side of data regulations 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 the related headaches of storage and data costs.

Making the Most of Self-Service Opportunities

Telcos that empower customers to serve themselves via a two-way digital dialogue will be able to reduce and reassign and support day-to-day resource demands. Ideally, it’s an initiative that would help drive loyalty and deliver new digital engagement models in which all of a customer’s needs can be largely served via automated self-service systems. In these circumstances, staff only step in if there are exceptional or unusual customer needs.

Smart omni-channel digital communication helps the telecom make the most of customer channel preferences to schedule and inform specific types of contacts with the right content, based on when their prospects and customer base are most likely to be receptive.

Thanks to automation, FICO Customer Communication Services can handle multiple hourly contact strategies that aren't exclusively reliant on manpower capacity and shift patterns. Two-way digital dialogues ensure you can reach prospects at any time and via any channel. It’s clear in our hyper-personalized world, prospects and customers always expect great things from every firm they transact with. Telcos are no different. Loyalty is always a prize and an asset worth pursuing.

Today’s consumers want convenience, ease, and personalized treatment throughout their customer journey. Everything matters — at onboarding, of course, but also if they drop out, opt to switch to another service level, or simply go quiet. Embedding real-time omni-channel communications into your digital account opening enables you to continue engaging with applicants if they’re interrupted. The solution also ensures they know you’re available and accountable in real-time via the communications channels they prefer, at a time that suits, and gets them accustomed to self-serving through your digital applications, SMS, and other channels.

Why let a competitor win your business, when the tools for retention and customer loyalty are so firmly within reach?

How FICO Is Helping

Analysis shows, most consumers favour self-service, virtual agents, and other automated communication channels, simply because they’re fast, easy, convenient, and private. Even if a customer has started a two-way digital dialogue with you, before going quiet or dropping out, it's still possible to send a prompt and recover the opening transaction.All companies face the ongoing threat of losses and customer attrition, so finding new ways to engage the market is important to driving responsiveness, satisfaction, recovery, and future profitability.

Growing telco portfolios is a critical challenge during periods of economic uncertainty and an ongoing squeeze on household income. Success hinges on understanding the evolving financial picture of customers - and the best actions to take to win and retain them. FICO technology and know-how ensure you can cost-effectively combine data, and automate offerings and digital credit decisions, to successfully acquire and retain more customers.

Rising costs of living, inflation, and a jump in interest rates are having a huge impact on consumer behaviour and spending. Telcos, like many other firms, are all operating in a highly aggressive market – but want to retain and grow market share while maximizing profit and maintaining acceptable risk levels.

By plugging into the power of analytics and artificial intelligence, it’s possible to deliver faster, smarter, automated, risk-aware, and personalized decisions at scale. FICO Platform can help optimize customer interactions in real-time, to help win more business with the right decisions and improved customer engagement. It combines industry-leading advanced analytics, decision modeling, and AI. The platform also frees up IT teams to focus time, effort, and resources on creating and quickly deploying the very best enhancements to your customers.

The global pandemic was a catalyst for extensive innovation, especially around the adoption of digital platforms. As the market evolves, your customers expect you to evolve as well. We’re helping our clients across the globe grow their businesses at speed and at scale, to meet the needs of their markets.

Learn How FICO Can Help Your Business Compete on Service

• Read my previous post, Delivering Trust for Risk-Aware Telcos - Using Data and Analytics
• Read the briefing paper Digital Onboarding: Fast Decisioning with Managed Risk
• Read the post on how to predict churn an delinquency to improve telco customer retention
• Explore an excellent telco case study
• See our infographic on telco and today's digital customers
• See our overview on making optimized collections decisions