Best practices for managing industry-specific information: Telecommunications customers, products, and networks

Telecom operators are increasingly aware of the importance of treating customers, products, and network data as business assets. In addition, these companies face the dilemma of dealing with large data-related issues such as Call detail Records (CDR), billing and data-use event records, social media and geo-positioning information. This paper discusses best practices for managing different types of information in the telecommunications industry.

Improve the overall customer experience by building a single customer view across multiple islands

The cost of developing new customers is high, so most telecom companies are very concerned about retaining the existing customer base and reducing the customer churn rate. Telecom companies have recognized that the overall customer experience is closely related to customer loyalty and revenue. As more and more service subscribers go to prepaid (on-demand) mode, this issue becomes increasingly important because there are no annual contracts and no service termination fines, so subscribers can easily switch to another SIM module with an on-demand provider. The customer experience is based on a series of interactions between the customer and the enterprise, including making calls, sending SMS messages, viewing weather forecasts, ordering new services, communicating with a call center agent, recharging a prepaid phone, or receiving a monthly bill for a paid call.

Most telecom companies use customer, service, and network data to analyze customer experiences extensively. Reliable information governance enhances the analytical credibility associated with the customer experience and enables telecommunications enterprises to manage the customer experience more effectively and economically. Information governance initiatives need to improve the reliability of multiple attributes related to the overall customer experience:

 Demographic data, such as gender, age, marital status, nationality, socio-economic class, income and language preferences, are important in supporting the marketing department in the implementation of segmentation models, marketing campaigns, and customer churn models for customers. This type of data is easy to obtain for customers with post paid contracts, but there are serious problems with the effectiveness of such data for prepaid customers. For example, a mobile operator's marketing department may notice that younger customers use SMS more frequently than voice calls. The product management team will develop new packages that require a fixed monthly contract fee to get a large number of SMS message bars in the package, but shorter calls. The marketing department then targets the younger clients and carries out marketing activities. However, because of the poor information governance associated with age attributes, for example, the birthday of an operator with thousands of service subscribers is 11-1-1111, so it is likely that mobile operators will send preferential package information to incorrect customers. Later, these customers will find that the package is not suitable for themselves, which will adversely affect the image of the mobile operator.

 Customer preferences is also critical. For example, from a privacy perspective, the "Do not contact me" indicator is very important. The information governance plan needs to ensure that the data administrator can manage the accuracy of the "do not contact me" indicator, otherwise the operator may face a regulatory penalty.
The  Family structure is very important to the residents ' customers. The marketing department can draw better insights into which parents may use different accounts and know other service users who may be children.

 Usage data, usage data related to call detail records (CDR), Internet Protocol Business Details (IPDR), phone recharge records, and value-added services (e.g., weather forecasts, bell tones, movies and music downloads). The marketing department of the operator realizes information governance around the business rules in the marketing activity management system. As a result, marketing departments have found inconsistent rules, such as providing traffic monitoring services to customers who do not subscribe to data services.

Support product standardization plan across the Enterprise

One department reports the income of some type and model of red and blue mobile phones separately. The other department does not distinguish between colors. There are inconsistencies in the naming and hierarchy of products, which leads to the emergence of multiple islands, and the telecom enterprises that seek development through mergers and acquisitions face many problems.

A telecom operator manages the catalog of its enterprise products. The operator's legacy product catalog has more than 20,000 unified service scripts (USOC). However, the operator decided to adopt a new business directory that contained only 500 products that accounted for 99% of its revenue. The implementation of the new catalog shortens product management's time to launch new products by 70% and increases the revenue of related products by 3%-4%. Eventually, the operator shortened the training time for new customer service representatives by four weeks through a streamlined catalogue. This is important because a customer service representative has an average duration of 12 months.

Improve the effectiveness of performance management, capacity planning, and location-based services

Telecom operators invest large sums of money to develop networks to support new generation products such as location-based services.

A large telecom operator found that the main data related to network assets has serious data quality problems. The telecoms operator uses different systems for network configuration and network asset management, respectively. The Network Field Operations team may receive service requests to upgrade the trunk within the network configuration system. However, because the network asset system is maintained by another team, such changes are not always reflected in the network asset management system. Subsequently, network asset data flows into the business intelligence system. Because the business intelligence system is still reflecting the slower trunk, the performance management team classifies the trunk as a bottleneck because the report shows that the usage of the trunk is 300%.

To make things worse, the capacity planning team also included this trunk in its own planned upgrade checklist. If all thousands of kinds of network elements Repeat this situation, operators will face formidable challenges. As the network asset system reflects the adequacy of network capacity, operators will continue to receive new customer orders. However, they will not find enough capacity until the network technician checks the switch. On the other hand, nearly 40% of the upgrade requests sent to the Network Field Operations team do not actually require incremental network construction. The operator also faces the problem of metadata, which is inconsistent with the terms "nodes", "routers" and "switches" in their networks.

Cut costs by managing information more effectively

Few industries are more visibly aware of the pressure from the big bang than telecoms. The impact on the IT budget has also seriously impacted the way in which telecommunications companies view traditional it and business operations.

In addition, over the past decade, government agencies have increased demand for telecoms companies, such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's request to access massive historical CDR data. Many telecom companies are beginning to realize that without robust information lifecycle governance processes and policies, they will not be able to meet the needs of all stakeholders. For example, an Asian telecoms operator is currently using information Lifecycle management tools to archive more than 1 TB of data per month.

Protects access to sensitive, large data such as CDR, IPDR, and location information

Telecom operators generate highly sensitive data about their customers, including who they talk to, when they talk, how often they talk, where they call, what data services they use, how often they use them, and what they download. If this information is inadvertently leaked to others, it can cause a lot of trouble to customers, more likely to lead to the operators face fines and reputation damage risk.

A large operator wants to implement a predictive analysis strategy for customer churn rate management. The operator has decided that it needs to outsource its analysis to overseas suppliers. Because the CDR needs to be sent to its suppliers on a daily basis, they are very concerned about how to protect the privacy of their customers ' data. After careful consideration, the operator decided to screen out sensitive data such as names, because the most valuable field in customer churn analysis was the number of calls and calls.

Ensure consistency of business definitions

Telecom operators also need to improve the consistency of key business definitions. For example, per-user average income (ARPU) is a key term that is the primary basis for senior management to make decisions. However, marketing, finance, and sales departments often have different definitions of ARPU. For example, the finance department may include employees in the customer churn rate calculation, but marketing departments are likely to exclude employees from the customer churn rate calculation. Information governance programs need to promote a consistent definition of key business terms.

In managing customers, products, networks, and large data, telecom operators need to focus on a number of areas. As with any other information governance program, it is important to start small by identifying a set of key attributes, measuring results, leading to support from senior management, and then gradually broadening the scope.