The Big Data Mindset: Customer Experience Driving Streaming Big Data Adoption in Telecoms

Customer experience has long been a tricky area for telecommunication service providers, wireless and wireline. Not that the data hasn’t been there, but it’s been distributed across different organizational and data silos, and making use of it has been challenging. In fact, the lack of a complete customer view has driven partial insights based on limited KPIs, resulting in a view of the world that’s always amber, there’s always something a little bit wrong; the information content is not very useful at all.

Understandably, the focus has been on the corporate and VIP accounts.  Here the issue is often simpler as there is likely to be dedicated hardware and logical resources, a direct relationship between customer and network- insight, at some level, is easier. But limited insight is no longer sufficient in a world of predominately IP-based voice, video and data services, with multi-channel access to both the network and to customer support, and where OTT and third party providers are entering the value chain.

Understanding the Big Data Mindset

Both sides of The Big Data Mindset are also at play.  From the business customer perspective, they are looking for deeper SLAs covering all aspects of the service, and expect to be able to monitor and adjust service, and receive notifications, in real-time. From the network and service provider perspective, The Big Data Mindset manifests itself in a better understanding as to what can be achieved, and the will to achieve.  However, the tools available at their disposal have been letting them down.

Streaming analytics for the Telecommunications industry

Streaming data analytics enables any number of different machine data sources to be combined and analyzed in real-time, before the data are stored, and also by replaying stored data. Streaming addresses both sides of the The Data Mindset. From the service provider’s perspective, streaming enables the real-time 360 degree view of the customer, and from the customer’s perspective, they are seeing a level of service and responsiveness hereto unavailable.

Faster time to insight

But what does this mean in practice, what can streaming really achieve in practice?  Streaming data management offers faster, real-time insights into data as they are created, but can also bridge the gap to the holy grail of customer experience management – the ability to drive real-time decisioning from operational data. This includes:

  • Real-time rating and policy updates from streaming CDR and IPDR data
  • Customer experience – a real-time view of the customer, combining call data, location information, website interactions, support interaction, network, device and service data.
  • Real-time fraud alerting from the streaming correlation of CDR/IPDR data streams, trend and KPI data on customer behavior, and pattern-based intrusion attacks.
  • Self-Optimized Networks (SON), an integrated, multi-vendor view of network performance with the facility to drive real-time, automated updates.

So in summary, streaming streaming data analytics offers Telcos new insights into their customers’ behavior and the revenue potential of their services, and for the first time, enables true real-time operations to be delivered, with rapid time to value, and with the lowest overall cost of performance.