With advancements in 5G technology and the increasing use of smartphones, telecom companies are looking to the future with renewed hope. The global shift to remote working has further contributed to the growth of the industry, with reports suggesting the global telecom market to reach $3.4 trillion by 2025. While this growth is encouraging – and seems sustainable – it also brings about its own challenges, like causing a massive amount of data to flow through telecom networks.
The Data Imperative in the Telecom Industry
Like businesses across other sectors, telecom companies are also increasingly relying on data to run their business and enhance profitability. They need to harness the power hidden in their data to provide elevated customer experiences, an emerging and ever-present challenge for telecom companies. Telecom companies are also waking up to the need to expand their service offerings beyond merely providing communication services. They recognize that they must make the most of the customer data at their disposal to enable a new generation of revenue opportunities by becoming digital service providers.
So, why do telcos need to capitalize on growing volumes of data?
Let’s look at all the things data helps telecom companies achieve:
- Optimize networks: Live data analysis can enable telecom companies to get insight into performance issues and take steps to proactively resolve them. Active network data monitoring helps optimize network potential, reduce congestion, and achieve strategic goals amid increasing scale and complexity.
- Enhance customer experience: Active data monitoring enables telecom companies to identify when and where to expand capacity for enhanced customer experience.
- Improve security: Constant data analysis enables telecom companies to identify security gaps and loopholes, enabling prompt action to prevent fraud and theft.
- Enable and ensure compliance: With the telecom sector exposed to regular scrutiny, the right approach to data can also aid companies in highlighting compliance gaps and bottlenecks. This can help them make the right decisions and adhere to growing regulations in a rapidly-changing environment.
But if companies want to act on this data, they need to find a way to rapidly store, process, and extract useful insights from the available data and use them to make critical business decisions like how to personalize offerings to drive customer engagement, retention, and loyalty. And the best way to do this is by investing in the right data products.
What This Means for Telecom Companies
Leveraging data to make intelligent business decisions and driving the business to the pinnacle of success is on every telco’s mind. But wanting to make the most of data is not just about adopting generic big data analytics solutions. Telecom companies have to relook at their existing tech stack and invest in data products that have been curated keeping the precise nuances of the sector in mind.
Designing and implementing forward-thinking telecommunication solutions can enable companies to exploit data-driven technology products that keep business needs at the centre of development. By uncovering detailed insights into every aspect of the business, telcos can deliver with speed, respond with agility, and drive competitive advantage. For instance, the right data products can enable telecom companies to gain insights into network capacity, effectively planning for trunk and route management.
They can also identify fraudulent activities in the network like revenue share fraud, roaming fraud, robocalling, VoIP & SIP fraud, and more.
Telecom-specific data products ensure seamless integration with the existing business ecosystem helping companies achieve the best results.
How To Build the Right Data Products
Despite various market tools, standard solutions can’t address the telecom industry’s unique challenges effectively due to its specific requirements.
To overcome issues around cybersecurity, network congestion, and complex operational processes, companies need highly tailored data products that can cater to telecom-specific needs. These solutions leverage human intelligence with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enable enterprises to streamline tasks across fraud detection, network congestion, and revenue assurance.
If you want to build such products, you need to:
- Make the most of AI-based analytical frameworks to boost confidence in the application of data-driven actions and avoid human errors.
- Invest in the right skillsets across different profiles to develop and deploy robust data analytics programs using a low-code AI orchestration workbench.
- Look at ways to complement existing technology systems and implement scalable solutions to optimize ROI.
- Utilize human intelligence in tandem with AI to improve real-time monitoring, making it adaptable to future changes in business variables.
The experts at our group company GTS Tech Labs have been curating highly-tailored data products for the telecom industry. An example is the advanced product – Grentor, enabling network providers to access real-time data and gain insights on revenue reconciliation, fraud, telecom traffic, and more. It delivers interactive dashboards allowing companies to identify frauds in the network. It can also be used to track and analyze consumers, monitor network usage, and uncover ways to drive better customer experiences.
Final Thoughts
As telecommunication companies experience unprecedented growth, there is a lot they can achieve by building the right data products. By combining AI with human intelligence and low-code technologies, telcos can get all the insights they need to make the right business decisions.
It’s time to invest in the right data products today to predict your peak network usage periods, uncover ways to reduce congestion, improve demand forecasting, plan for extra capacity, and constantly act on live data to drive profitability and prevent customer churn.
Talk to us to understand the next steps in how to go about doing so.