Industry: Telco

Blog: The Importance of Customer Experience in Driving Loyalty Across the Subscriber Lifecycle

Written by Allison Karavos on November 27, 2024. Posted in Blog. No Comments on Blog: The Importance of Customer Experience in Driving Loyalty Across the Subscriber Lifecycle

Telcos: The Importance of Customer Experience in Driving Loyalty Across the Subscriber Lifecycle

How Intelligent Decisioning Can Elevate the Subscriber Journey

For telcos, delivering exceptional customer experience is more critical than ever. As service offerings become increasingly commoditized (and competition flourishes), telco providers have to differentiate themselves to stay ahead of the curve. And one of the best ways to do that? Create meaningful, frictionless interactions at every subscriber touchpoint across the journey. A seamless, well-crafted subscriber experience enhances customer satisfaction, sure. But the implications are more far reaching than that, playing a critical role in reducing churn, increasing loyalty, and maximizing the lifetime value of each of your subscribers. From the second a customer is onboarded, through to ongoing customer management (and collections treatments if it comes to that), optimizing the customer experience is crucial to maintaining long-term relationships and staying ahead of the competition. How can you elevate the experiences of your subscribers? Intelligent, holistic risk decisioning.

Streamlining Onboarding in the Telco Industry: How Automation is Changing the Game

The Onboarding Challenge:

Onboarding in the telco industry is a complex process, in part because of the diverse needs of your customers, which can range from individual subscribers with little to no credit histories to large enterprises. Traditional (aka manual) onboarding methods often create bottlenecks, with lengthy wait times and inconsistent experiences – leading to customer frustration and increasing the risk of churn. And then there is the demand for real-time decisions, including credit assessments and fraud checks, which have to be handled quickly (and accurately) to keep up with increasingly high customer expectations. As a result, telcos are turning to automation to deliver a more seamless onboarding experience.
Enhancing Subscriber Experience:

Automation is changing the onboarding process, streamlining key steps that previously bogged down telco providers. One of the most impactful uses of automation is identity verification, which is a must-have step in every subscriber’s journey. Automated IDV tools can quickly and accurately collect customer data, reducing the need for manual paperwork that slows down the verification process. This speeds up onboarding of course, but also greatly enhances the accuracy of customer profiles, helping to ensure better service delivery right from the start.

Another key aspect is real-time credit risk assessment. Automated systems can enable you to instantly evaluate a potential subscriber’s creditworthiness, delivering immediate decisions that eliminate manual reviews – and the long wait times that are associated with them. This allows for lightning-fast onboarding and minimal disruptions for your subscribers, while still ensuring informed risk decisions.
Reducing Friction and Preventing Fraud:

Fraud is especially rampant in the telco industry. Last year, telco fraud increased 12%, worth an additional $38.95 billion lost. As a provider, you have to balance the need for speed in onboarding, while effectively detecting and preventing fraudulent activities. AI-driven automation in your risk decisioning can play a pivotal role – minimizing friction for your legitimate customers and ensuring robust fraud prevention measures for those that aren’t. Intelligent fraud decisioning can analyze multiple data points in real-time to detect and prevent fraud before it happens, without causing delays or unnecessary hurdles for your honest subscribers. Reducing that friction enhances the customer experience, and reduces the likelihood of false positives, which can frustrate potential subscribers.

When we’re talking fraud or other risk assessments, data integration is critical to creating a consistent, seamless onboarding experience across all channels. Whether your subscribers begin their journey online, in-store, or via a mobile app, automation in your data and decisioning processes ensures that all relevant data is collected and integrated appropriately. This level of orchestration and integration helps you provide a unified, personalized experience that results in an effortless onboarding experience in the eyes of your subscribers. And happy subscribers = long-lasting customers.

Powering Loyalty with Precision: How Intelligent Credit Decisioning Enhances the Subscriber Experience

Personalized Risk Decisioning:

Your subscribers expert more than one-size-fits-all solutions, especially when it comes to financial decisions like credit approvals. For telcos, personalized decisioning will help manage your risk, but it’s also an opportunity to improve the satisfaction of your subscribers and build brand loyalty. Using real-time data to customize risk decisions based on individual profiles will allow you to offer a range of tailored options (including specific credit limits or repayment terms) that cater to each subscriber’s unique needs. Have high-risk customers? You can offer more cautious lending terms. Lower-risk subscribers? Give them higher credit limits or faster approvals. When individual financial situations are understood and accommodated, satisfaction and loyalty increase as a result.
Building Loyalty with Flexible Financial Solutions:

By offering more flexibility in your financial products, including personalized pricing and payment plans, you’ll further enhance the subscriber experience. You can leverage subscriber history and credit profiles to provide tailored pricing that matches a customer’s financial capacity, preferences, and risk tolerance. This kind of flexibility fosters a sense of fairness and transparency, building trust in your brand. But clear communication is essential in this process. When you provide your customers with choices (repayment terms, plan upgrades, credit extensions), you empower subscribers to make informed financial decisions that best suit their unique circumstances. This transparency strengthens relationships long-term – and these days, with the extreme proliferation of competition, you can never have too much brand loyalty.
The Role of AI/ML in Intelligent Risk Assessment:

Offering flexible, personalized options is easier said than done. That kind of agility requires advanced technology, including intelligent decisioning with AI/ML capabilities. By analyzing vast amounts of customer data, AI-driven risk decisioning technology can quickly and accurately assess the creditworthiness of your subscribers, making real-time decisions possible across the subscriber lifecycle. With the use of machine learning algorithms, you can refine your risk assessments over time, continuously enabling smarter and more efficient risk decisions and more easily identifying patterns that point to fraudulent activities or the need for financial support. The use of AI not only makes your risk assessments faster, but it helps create a strong foundation for sustainable subscriber growth. Faster, smarter risk assessments = the ability to better manage your risk and offer personalized products to your loyal customers. An intelligent, data-driven approach to decisioning ultimately means a more satisfying customer experience and a more nuanced risk strategy for long-term growth.

Ongoing Customer Management: Proactive Monitoring for a Seamless Customer Experience

A memorable (in a good way!) customer experience goes beyond onboarding – it extends to the ongoing management of risk and fraud across the entire subscriber lifecycle. With continuous monitoring for fraud and credit risk, you can stay ahead of potential issues without disrupting the customer experience – and actually help to improve it. With advanced analytics and AI-driven tools, you can identify and address risky behaviors or anomalies in real-time, ensuring your customers remain safe while enjoying uninterrupted service. Proactive fraud prevention measures like SIM-swap monitoring add an extra layer of security for subscribers who might otherwise be targets of account takeovers or identity theft. With ongoing monitoring, you can flag unusual patterns without adding friction, allowing you to effectively balance security and convenience.

But it goes beyond risk mitigation. With a focus on intelligent solutions, you can deliver more personalized experiences across the lifecycle, allowing you to proactively offer your customers more tailored offers and maximize upsell and cross-sell opportunities. And personalizing offers can generate 40% more revenue when compared to telcos that don’t. By carefully analyzing customer data and behavior, you can offer real-time recommendations that align with each subscriber’s unique needs and preferences – and maximize the lifetime value of those subscribers as a result. For example, a customer who travels frequently could be offered a specialized roaming package, while a subscriber who always pays their bill on time could be offered incentives and upgrades for their loyalty. This holistic, end-to-end approach enhances satisfaction, sure, but it also boosts engagement and retention. Customer churn is an ongoing challenge for telcos, with an average churn rate in the industry of 30-35%, but subscribers who receive personalized offers and support are more likely to feel connected, and loyal, to your brand. Focusing on AI-driven personalization enables you to turn routine customer interactions into meaningful engagements, going beyond a traditional provider-customer dynamic.

Collections With Care: Strategies to Preserve Relationships While Reducing Bad Debt

Collections present a unique challenge in the telco industry. Recovering payments is essential for financial stability, but it’s also critical to maintain positive relationships with your subscribers during the process. This balancing act between securing payment and preserving goodwill needs a strategic approach that recognizes the lifetime value of a customer beyond the current transaction. With a heavy-handed or impersonal collections approach, you’re asking for dissatisfaction and churn, underscoring the need for more thoughtful, customer-centric collections practices.

With intelligent decisioning, you can enable collections treatment strategies that consider each subscriber’s unique profile and history. By leveraging data-driven insights, you can create tailored repayment terms that align with unique financial situations, making it easier for your subscribers to meet their obligations without feeling pressure or shame. AI-driven solutions allow you to further segment subscribers based on risk profiles and payment behavior. Low-risk customers who miss a payment as an oversight can be contacted with a gentle reminder via a low-pressure channel, while high-risk customers can receive more proactive, assertive assistance options. By segmenting your subscribers and providing customized communications via preferred channels, you can approach your collections strategy with a focus on preserving relationships (and maximizing the lifetime value of your customers), reducing the chance of churn. And with a transparent, empathetic approach to your collections communications, you’ll further cement those positive relationships.

Building Lasting Connections

Delivering an exceptional customer experience across the entire subscriber lifecycle is essential for managing risk, sustaining loyalty, and fostering growth. From onboarding through to ongoing customer management and collections, each stage in the subscriber lifecycle offers you an opportunity to build stronger, more enduring relationships. Embrace automation. Enable personalization. Utilize intelligent decisioning. These strategies will allow you to streamline the customer journey, reduce friction, and provide the tailored experiences your subscribers expect – enabling you to safeguard against fraud and mitigate risk without compromising customer trust.

Investing in innovative, advanced decisioning solutions is no longer optional, it’s a strategic imperative to stay ahead of customer churn – and your competition. By enhancing every aspect of the customer journey, you can ensure your subscribers feel valued and supported, leading to more loyalty, less churn, and sustainable long-term growth. Ready to elevate your approach?

Discover how Provenir’s decisioning solutions can enhance subscriber experiences.

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Three Steps to Fight Telco Fraud

Written by Allison Karavos on November 25, 2024. Posted in Blog.

BLOG

Minimize Risk, Maximize Activations:
Three Steps to Fighting Telco Fraud

Do you have billions of dollars to spare?
If not, keep reading.

Telecommunications (telco) operators lose an estimated $40 billion to fraudsters each year, and it’s getting worse.

Last year, telco fraud increased 12%, worth an additional $38.95 billion lost and with the rising cost of handsets, fraudsters are getting away with higher value products and services. It’s becoming harder than ever to identify fraudulent behavior as it becomes more complex – there are more than 200 types of fraud within the telco industry alone. The problem clearly isn’t going away any time soon.

SIM swapping:

Where attackers manipulate providers’ security protocols to hijack users’ phone numbers, allowing unauthorized access to sensitive personal data and financial accounts.

But don’t throw up your hands in defeat just yet! Telcos can fight back with three highly effective tactics that together can reduce bad debt up to 69%. Just use the three As:

Access
Analyze
Action

At the core of it all? Another A: alternative data. Feeding alternative data into each step of the fraud mitigation process is the key to recapturing billions in annual losses.

Access

The first step to fighting fraud is Access – accessing data, including alternative data, provides more thorough information for fraud and KYC checks during the activation processes.

A common kind of fraud at this stage of the customer lifecycle is subscription fraud, which can be very costly. Fraudsters use stolen IDs and credit card information to create accounts, buy expensive handsets, and either pocket the free merchandise or resell it. If the criminal is purchasing a state-of-the-art smartphone, that’s potentially thousands in lost revenue from a single scheme.

Access to a deep well of traditional and alternative data sources empowers you to identify even the most subtle abnormalities during fraud and KYC checks at onboarding. For example, synthetic IDs are commonly used by fraudsters to open accounts, which can be difficult to catch, since synthetic IDs use some legitimate elements to fly under the radar. Alternative data can give you the clues you need to spot fraud, even in cases like this. Check the email to see if there are any minor changes or see if the geolocation matches social media activity.
Analyze

Step two is Analyze: accurately analyze all the data you’ve accessed. And don’t just analyze it the old fashioned way – integrate embedded intelligence like machine learning and AI into your analytics.

Say a phishing victim has had their phone breached and the criminal has text forwarding activated so they can receive a security code. AI/ML analysis of mobile data could alert a risk team that texts are being forwarded, and suggest further checks be performed.

Tactics like account takeover can cause damage even after onboarding. Imagine having to catch tiny inconsistencies for hundreds of thousands of subscribers throughout the entire lifecycle all on your own. It can be a challenge for legacy decisioning solutions to identify complex fraud indicators.

Having smart, automated technology that can pick out unusual data and analyze it quickly and accurately will make the difference for both new and active subscribers. Machine learning and AI gets smarter as it analyzes data and behavior, getting better at recognizing fraudulent patterns that would have otherwise been overlooked.

Optimize your fraud process with machine learning and AI technology that can analyze any kind of data and improves its accuracy with each analysis.
Action

The final step to help you stop fraud is Action: when you have accessed all the traditional and alternative data you need and AI/ML has analyzed it, you are ready to decision.

If the first layer of checks don’t yet paint a clear picture of the legitimacy of a subscriber, your decisioning solution can look deeper into the data for further analysis. Depending on your model, you might instead offer them a plan for high-risk subscribers, or reject them outright. If everything checks out, on the other hand, your decisioning engine would then approve and onboard.

Advanced decisioning uses all of the data you’ve gathered to make the most accurate decisions- that protect you against fraud. It improves efficiency and saves you money by performing only necessary checks – you never have to take a one-size-fits-all approach.

Once decisions are made, the outcomes are fed back into the platform, adding even more valuable data and analysis to help the AI/ML technology guide your decisioning to more accurate decisions in the future.

International Revenue Share Fund (IRSF):

Involves the exploitation of premium-rate numbers to generate large call volumes and siphon profits – with impacts extended beyond financial losses to include damaged customer trust and brand reputation, and increased operational costs.

We’ve seen some examples of how alternative data can fuel a decisioning engine to fight fraud, but what is it exactly? Check out the top three things telcos should know about this powerful tool.

Part 2:
Three Things Telcos Should Know About Alternative Data

The financial landscape is vast, especially at a global scale. Telco spans that landscape, as wireless services and products like handsets and modems are in high-demand among people from all financial backgrounds. To reach them, you can’t only rely on traditional data like credit scores to determine risk of default. Collecting and using alternative data can help you impact countless lives, tapping into an enormous worldwide market.

1. What is alt data?

It’s not data that wears eyeliner and plays guitar – it’s a powerful tool for financial inclusion.

Simply put, alternative data is all the information not maintained by credit bureaus that can paint a more holistic picture of a person’s financial health and overall risk. It can include financial information like rent, utility, or even telco payments, but also analyzes other information like social media activity, geolocation, and property records.

Alternative data can tell a more complete story than traditional data alone. There are nearly 30 million “credit invisibles” in the US and close to another 10 million in Canada, joined by 70% of Latin America’s population, 70% of Southeast Asia’s, and almost one quarter of the entire world – there are nearly 1.4 billion people without banking or credit history. That’s an awful lot of people who wouldn’t be qualified to open a telco account via traditional methods alone.

And while credit scores have proven to be strong indicators of whether someone will pay their bills on time, doesn’t it make sense to actually take into consideration utility and other recurring payment patterns to predict the same behavior for telco? Over 90% of Americans make payments on financed mobile phones, but only 2.5% of consumer credit bureau files contain telco payment information. While you might have the payment records for your own subscribers, being able to access that information for those looking to switch operators would be a reliable way to determine risk. Layering in utility data on top of credit scores gives you highly relevant insights to provide even stronger indicators of risk.

Telco, utility, and lease/property information is often highly indicative of credit trustworthiness but just isn’t considered by credit bureaus. That’s why alternative data is so powerful.
2. How to pull alt data?

Telcos can access alternative data through public records, along with any data partners you might have integrated into your decisioning solution. These data partners could share social media activity, employment information, and more – what you can access all dependent on your region’s compliance rules and regulations around credit decisioning.

While this information may not have as direct a correlation with credit trustworthiness, it can give you a fuller picture of someone’s lifestyle. Social media, for instance, can be a very enlightening source of alternative data, giving you insight into activities and habits that may be relevant. As more social media companies begin to offer embedded payment options on their platforms, someone’s Instagram profile could provide you with a look into their transactional behavior. Understanding how often a person shops on Instagram, how expensive the items they buy are, and if these purchases relate to the timeliness of their bill payments could be helpful ways to analyze this behavior.

Make sure you have access to data integrations and partners that will offer you the widest lens within the required parameters to look at subscribers in order to get the best results from alternative data. Choosing technology that can accelerate partner integration and alternative data access will guarantee rapid ROI, connecting you with more subscribers, faster.
3. Does alt data work?

Yes! Credit scores may not necessarily reflect a person’s current financial health, as the score heavily weighs past credit behavior in addition to current behavior. Even if someone is very responsible in the present, bad decisions from their past could still negatively affect their credit. If you ran that person’s profile through your traditional decisioning process, they might get flagged as high risk, leading to an inaccurate assessment. The same would be true of someone who never had access to credit due to past financial status or discriminatory lending practices. Alternative data solves that problem.

And there’s evidence to support it: 64% of lenders/credit providers that use alternative data see improved risk assessment, 48% have an increase in offer acceptance, and 64% see tangible benefits within one year of implementation. Other benefits include improved decisioning accuracy, better fraud protection, greater financial inclusion, faster speed-to-market, rapid onboarding, and overall maximized value.

We’re living in an era where information is as accessible as it’s ever been – it’s time to use it. The telco industry is at the forefront of innovation, so why keep assessing creditworthiness the same way we did decades ago? When you integrate alternative data into your decisioning, you’re making the world even bigger for millions of people who need telco services and inviting in low-risk subscribers that will accelerate your growth.

Where does intelligent risk decisioning come in?

Intelligent, holistic risk decisioning solutions can play a pivotal role in empowering telco providers to combat fraud effectively. By leveraging real-time data integration (ahem, the three As already covered) and machine learning, these advanced fraud solutions can analyze vast amounts of data from multiple sources at every stage of the customer journey. This enables you to ensure that fraudulent activities are detected and prevented before they escalate, enhancing speed, accuracy in decision-making, and improving the subscriber experience. Provenir customer MTN was able to stop an additional 135% of high-risk transactions via fraud mitigation solutions, without adding friction to the application process. Implementing intelligent risk decisioning not only mitigates fraud but also improves operational efficiency and enhances the overall customer experience. Ready to fight back?