Communications and Technology Industry Research

While customer insight influences mobile operators’ growth and investment strategies, existing subscriber data simply do not provide them enough information for analyzing customer behavior, according to new research. The survey, conducted by Loudhouse Research, a U.K.-based independent research company, on behalf of Nokia Siemens (News - Alert) Networks, included interviews with 100 senior executives working across a spectrum of mobile operators and mobile Internet portals.

 

More than half the respondents (53 percent) stated that existing customer data infrastructure doesn’t enable analysis of customer behavior, while almost as many (46 percent) complain that data is not being analyzed quickly enough. In addition, only 14 percent of the respondents have visibility of customer churn rates on a real time basis.

 

With 87 percent of the respondents looking to improve customer insights over the next year, an improvement in the organization and availability is essential because, although many operators are sitting on terabytes of valuable customer data, the majority of it is rendered ineffective by fragmented databases and legacy data management platforms.

 

Though mobile data revenues from next generation services may still be small, the market is growing fast. Indeed, Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens Networks research forecasts that the amount of mobile data transmitted over mobile networks will increase 800  percent, reaching 13.5 million terabytes over the next four years. 

 

The growing pace and enthusiasm for mobile data is driving the need to increase the speed of creating and delivering mobile applications. While the average time to market for deploying a mobile application has improved from 10 months last year to 7 months this year, the more telling statistic revealed by the study is the desire of communications service providers to reduce this even further.

 

An interesting difference between mobile portals and mobile operators is their approach to data brokerage. Due to confidentiality requirements and longer-term customer relationships, only 4 percent of mobile operators are currently incentivizing their customers to allow their data to be shared with third party businesses. The comparable figure for mobile portals was 27 percent, highlighting their greater success in convincing customers to allow personal data sharing.  

 

“While Internet brands may be ahead of the game when it comes to making use of customer data, operators have woken up to the importance of harvesting and nurturing this data – and their lack of tools to do this properly,” said Rick Halton, head of profile solution management at Nokia Siemens Networks (News - Alert), in a statement. “The findings of this study are an acknowledgement of how much work is still needed to realize the opportunities presented by the mobile Internet. Operators have a huge amount of data at their disposal, and the need of the hour is to improve current methods of managing and analyzing this data to unlock its true value in real-time.”