Advanced Television

Forecast: Operators ‘weaponise’ customer service

January 6, 2021

With a rocky road ahead for their core offerings, triple play operators are having to weaponise customer care in order to keep a hold on their revenues, according to research from Rethink TV.

Traditional OSS/BSS offerings are not up to the job, which has given rise to a new breed of vendors, focused on improving QoS and customer experiences with household-level analytics. Rethink TV has grouped these vendors under a new umbrella term, ‘Customer Journey Management’ (CJM), and forecasts that this market will grow to $24.6 billion by 2026 – across the broadband and pay-TV segments. Through the forecast period, this will save operators $10.5 billion in churning revenues, as high-level, granular analytics allow operators to improve their QoS at a household level.

This growth of CJM offerings is rooted in wider market pressures that are fueling rising churn rates.  In pay-TV, the rise of OTT – and subsequent wave of cord cutting – has made understanding customer content needs essential, in order to retain their interest.  In broadband, the widespread availability of the service, with ever more entrants into the market, has rendered it a utility – where prices get competitive quickly. Ensuring a high quality of service is the best way for operators to retain customers here.

With increased exposure to more data points, AI-assisted CJM offerings will see increasingly better results. By 2026, CJM offerings will reduce pay-TV churn by 12.61 per cent –  a saving of $1.6 billion globally. This reduction is even greater in the Broadband sector, where CJM offerings will reduce churn by 26.26 per cent in 2026, saving operators $1.9 billion.

The cloud-based and modular nature of CJM offerings means that they are generally priced flat across the world and, as such, the monetary value of this market is in stark contrast to many forecasts in the triple play world. Populous regions with low ARPU, such as Asia Pacific, will see operators spend the same on CJM offerings on a per subscriber basis, meaning that by 2026, Asia Pacific spends $11.8 billion of CJM revenue – 48 per cent of global spend.

Categories: AI, Articles, Broadband, Broadcast, ISP, Markets, Pay TV, Research

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