Study: Operators failing to maximise customer experience
October 3, 2018
A study of major European broadcasters, pay-TV operators, telcos and OTT service providers by pay-TV subscription, billing and customer relationship management (CRM) specialist Paywizard reveals that all rank customer experience as a top strategic priority but the vast majority are failing to make effective use of subscriber data and analytics to engage consumers.
In-depth interviews with C-level executives from operators throughout Europe show that, across the board, TV and video service providers plan to increase their use of customer analytics over the next 12-18 months. The research findings reveal that 80 per cent believe they are only at the beginning of their customer analytics journey and need to boost their ability to analyse consumer data to ensure a consistently good customer experience.
“Lengthy interviews with the operators taking part in the study show clearly that virtually everyone providing a pay-TV service sees analytics as critical to understanding the customer journey and having the ability to take actions that enhance the customer experience – such as highly targeted offers and precisely-timed communications,” noted Bhavesh Vaghela, Paywizard’s Chief Executive. “But most still are unable to do that. There is a large gap between where operators are and where they want to be.”
The research report, Customer analytics in the post-OTT age: insights from European service providers, identified crucial Decision Moments in the customer journey when analytics can be used to determine the right action at the right time. These key points include: acquiring a new customer; tracking content consumption for recommendations and offers; upselling and cross-selling to boost average revenue per user; churn prediction and reduction; billing accuracy; and winning back lost subscribers.
The release of the research report comes on the heels of Paywizard launching Paywizard Singula, a standalone platform that empowers pay-TV operators and OTT providers to take a more intelligent, data-driven actions than ever to engage subscribers. The solution utilises subscriber insights and artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend ‘next best actions’ at each Decision Moment in the customer journey.
According to Vaghela, the research clearly demonstrates that customer experience has emerged as a key competitive differentiator in the pay-TV sector, with data analytics playing a critical role, but most TV and video operators don’t yet have the tools they need to get through to customers. “This analytics capability gap is the void Paywizard Singula can fill for operators capturing data on any platform,” he claimed.
“Overall, the operators we talked to believe the weakest part of their current analytics capability lies in predicting churn and winning back lost subscribers,” advised Ben Keen, an independent technology and media analyst and the author of the commissioned research report. “They also uniformly think that applying analytics to this stage of the customer journey would have one of the most positive impacts on their overall business performance.”
The research shows broadcasters and some stand-alone online video platforms are more advanced in their use of sophisticated analytics, while telcos struggle most to utilise customer data to advance their video businesses. The study also reveals that most operators do not even consider using data analysis to increase revenue from existing customers and, also surprisingly, few are employing analytics to improve billing accuracy, which previous research has shown to be a major annoyance for customers.