Leveraging the Internet of Behavior to Enhance the Customer Journey

Language changes as quickly as technology. In both areas we constantly see new terms and ideas, and in both cases, it can take a while to fully grasp the importance and relevance of these new developments.

These days, when we say Internet of Things (IoT), the CSP’s role is obvious. With consumers buying more and more smart devices, it’s clear CSPs need to provide the necessary connectivity to support these devices.

However, when we say Internet of Behavior (IoB), what comes to mind? How can CSPs leverage this emerging area—the analysis of the data gathered from the IoT—combining it with data collected from across their network to benefit their bottom line?

This is where we need to trot out another term—the customer journey. Like all businesses, CSPs want prospects to become customers, and want customers to stick around.

A good customer journey is shaped by understanding and meeting your customers’ desires and needs. After all, if you meet customer needs, there’s no reason for them to leave. With that in mind, let’s talk about how the IoB can enhance your company’s customer journey.

Know Your Network

Your network is the foundation of your promise to your customer, so if it doesn’t work—or doesn’t work as expected—you’re in for trouble.

The good news is that leveraging the data-gathering and analysis powers of the IoB can help optimize your network and keep your customers happy.

1) Understanding Congestion

It’s a simple correlation—as network congestion goes up, service quality goes down—with customer satisfaction following suit. That’s why mitigating or avoiding congestion is one of the best investments you can make.

IoB analysis helps with congestion in three main ways:

1. Historic view: Tells you where and when congestion has been occurring and which customers it affects.

1. Current view: Gives you real-time insight into network congestion events.

1. Future view: Predicts anticipated congestion and facilitates planning by allowing you to prioritize network capacity investments for maximum ROI.

2) Planning for Growth

Let’s dive into point three above. Because, while it’s true IoB can give you a future view to help with planning, that planning isn’t always as simple as you’d like.

It’s great to understand and/or predict what’s happening on your network at every single point in the day. But just knowing, doesn’t mean you can fix everything at once.

This is where the power of IoB helps you drill down even further. While it would be nice to address all your issues at once, some are more business-critical than others. For example:

• Meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements). If you have a mix of residential and business customers, it’s likely you need to meet stricter SLAs for the businesses. Metadata lets you easily distinguish between groups like these.
• Preserving high-revenue streams. Similarly, you may have customers who pay more. Leveraging IoB lets you break out your tiered customers to ensure you invest wisely to satisfy your most profitable customers first.

In a world of limited time and resources, understanding your network and how it impacts all your customers lets you prioritize your next business steps and investments.

3) Data Served Up

It’s not that you don’t have data. In fact, it may feel like you have too much data, without really knowing what to do with it.

IoB is about capturing, analyzing, understanding, and responding to the data generated every day in your business. In other words, it can help you with the next steps. With the implementation of analytics, automation, and machine learning, your data won’t just sit there waiting for somebody to have the time and know-how to sort through it. Customizable dashboards, charts, tables, and graphs can give you insights to optimize your network functioning and—that’s right—keep your customers happy.

Know Your Customers

Knowing your network is a huge step. Delivering the level of service your customers expect is job one.

However, IoB lets you do much more.

1) Understand What Matters to Your Customers

Analyzing and segmenting user types and usage patterns will help you understand what goals your users are trying to achieve when online.

There are many ways and reasons people use the Internet. Just a few include:

• Social networking
• Gaming
• Shopping
• Telecommuting
• Research
• Home business

By knowing who your customers are, and knowing that—for example—the dedicated gamers you serve have very different needs from your online-shop-til-you-drop customers, you can keep the customer journey on track by understanding and meeting a wide range of needs.

2) Predict Churn

It’s natural to worry mostly about people using too much of any given resource, but what if they’re not using enough? What if their usage of a particular device or application is dropping steadily?

This could be a predictor of churn, which means you could lose this customer …

… or you could save them.

What if you could contact them before they cancel? What if you could offer them an alternative package that meets their new needs and secures them as a happy customer?

Now that’s taking control of the customer journey.

3) Be Proactive

Avoiding churn isn’t the only way of being proactive. With the power of the IoB, there are many other ways to anticipate—and even influence—the customer journey. Just a few of these include:

• Alerting customers to new services or options when data suggests they might benefit from them.
• Prompting a customer to upgrade their device based on telltale data flags.
• Suggesting that a customer reconfigure their package to better reflect usage trends identified by their data.

Summary

Keeping customers happy is one of the best ways to boost profitability. The above examples are ways IoB can help you enhance the customer journey right now. As this area develops, the possibilities will also expand—leading to a scenario where you can increasingly personalize customer service with a plan that’s affordable and achievable for your business.

Incognito’s MAP solution is designed to help you do just that. Fueled by subscriber and network insights, we can equip you with the tools to further monetize and optimize your networks. Experiences become personalized, operations become intelligent, and insights turn into profit.

We can get you going, and help you move forward. Contact us to get started.