Telecommunications data and marketing

A scattergun approach to marketing will turn off more potential customers than it attracts. Offering packages to new customers or upselling existing ones is a case of knowing your audience. A tool like Experian’s Audience Engine can help delineate consumer verticals and enable you to talk to them via the perfect platform, with your most compelling offers going to the customers most likely to convert to a sale.

Loyal customers regularly using one service have the highest potential to subscribe to another. A Single Customer View, which combines and integrates their data across your portfolio of products, helps all department to contribute to a rich view of your customers’ habits, interactions and identities. With better insight comes maximum potential for cross marketing and upsells.

A lead only turns into a customer if they make it through your onboarding process. 66% of adults see valuing their time as the most important thing a company can do to optimise their online experience – delays in your signup procedure, slow credit decision-making or sluggish identity verification could see them wheel around to a competitor long before signing a contract. Experian can offer a suite of tools to help overcome every common speed bump.

Customers expect things to be easy, so a difficult application process is not exactly the ideal first step. If you’re offering credit, a platform like Experian’s PowerCurve decision management suite can help reduce friction by automating decision-making around the clock – and with a proper understanding of your risk appetite, it can also help you offer the right packages to the right customer.

Every customer has a limit. Charge too much and you risk alienating a potential sale or, worse, sending them to a competitor. Taking advantage of high-quality bureau insight, like that offered through Experian’s Affordability IQ, can help you understand each customer’s individual financial situation and tailor offers to match.

Some customers have variable income or struggle to manage their own finances – particularly in times of economic disruption. A tool like Affordability IQ can be used to detect signs of potential income shock by estimating not only a customer’s income but also their average current account turnover – and data like Experian’s UK Consumer Credit Forecast could help you make broader decisions, too.

An unhappy customer, or one in financial difficulty, is one at risk of walking away. But offering your existing customers the best contract renewal deal possible doesn’t have to mean implementing a long series of manual processes. Integrating an automated lending platform like PowerCurve Customer Acquisition means you can make instant credit approvals to every customer, tailored to your telco’s precise appetite for risk.

If a customer has lost income, acting fast helps both parties. By watching for signs of financial changes through a service like Affordability IQ you can adjust your credit limits up or down to match their funding or get an early warning which can help you offer payment holidays or lower rates to help them through.

Section C3.11 of Ofcom’s Consolidated General Conditions demands that any measures taken against a customer who has missed a payment ‘are proportionate and not unduly discriminatory’. Knowledge of a customer’s financial situation, through a service like Affordability IQ, can help your business form a balanced response to payment delinquency.

Ofcom states that it’s the telco’s responsibility to offer due warning to subscribers before any service interruption or disconnection. This starts with keeping customers’ records up to date. Enhancing your records with a service like Experian’s Data Quality Solutions can help to ensure customer contact details are correct, indicate potential suppressions, and even enrich your database to offer additional communication routes.

It is the responsibility of your business to treat all customers fairly and appropriately, particularly if you’ve been made aware that a customer is vulnerable or disabled. Maintaining a Single Customer View offers every department appropriate insight into every customer’s status, helps ensure that your communications are always delivered in the appropriate form, and can aid in properly sanitising data should Ofcom require proof of compliance.

As a business which stores customer data, it is your responsibility to store and maintain it properly. A Single Customer View ensures consistency throughout your organisation, allows you to offer them clarity over how their data is stored, and makes complying with a customer’s personal data requirements a straightforward one-step process rather than a difficult task of dealing with multiple data silos.

Whatever software you’re using for CRM, ERP or e-commerce, you could be doing it better. For example, taking advantage of data validation APIs such as those offered by Experian allows you to build standardised, sanitised and enriched data into every process, ensuring best practice is followed when dealing with customer postal addresses, email contacts and phone numbers.

82% of companies have gained a financial ROI from using artificial intelligence. Experian’s Hunter fraud management solution is one example of AI being put to work. It can automatically detect the signs of intentional deception and identity theft, helping to ensure fraudulent applications go no further than the sign-up page, and feeds into Experian Detect for a double layer of protection.

With employees progressively more scattered and data demanding greater accessibility than ever before, the burden it puts on your internal IT provision can be huge. But with a cloud-based identity platform like Experian CrossCore you get a flexible and scalable way to manage your customer data, improving your experience and that of your customers while significantly cutting operational overheads.

Speed and efficiency are key to keeping your customers happy. McKinsey research suggests that increasing a customer’s satisfaction with their journey by 20% can lift revenue by 15% and, indeed, lower your service costs by as much as 20%. Redesigning those journeys may be a difficult road for your business, but with the right data in the right place, and with tools which can speed up every step, there’s plenty of help available.