Analytics and BigData Use cases in Telecom

1. Customized product and marketing

Offering customized products or derive specific upsell or cross-sell opportunities based on analytical inputs derived
from a number of key attributes including – subscriber’s usage patterns, device preferences, billing data, customer
support requests, purchase history, buying preferences combined with their demographic information, location
and socio-economic factors. Telcos can now create targeted customer micro-segments to offer more customized
offers and campaigns. This enables campaigning team to proactively present the right offer at the right time, in the
right context to the right customer in order to improve conversion rates.

2. Proactive Customer Care

Using big data, Telcos are building intelligence and analytics tools so as to proactively identify issues and fix it or
offer a solution before it impacts the customer. Not only does it provides a compelling customer experience but it
also deflects and prevents calls to the customer care centers thereby lowering support costs. Customers are more
likely to recommend their service provider if the provider was able to identify and pre-emptively resolve potential
issues affecting them. Given the impacts, Service Providers are proactively fixing issues or reaching out to
customers to help resolve issues before they negatively impact the experience.

3. Customer churn prevention

With ease of number portability in several markets, Telcos need analyse, predict and prevent customer churn.
Segmenting customers for more accurate marketing campaigns is part of the overall objective of increased
customer satisfaction to prevent customers from churning. The key to a big data driven advanced analytics
solution providing optimal churn prevention will be its ability to provide preventive churn actions in real time.

Multi-SIM prediction: Preventing subscribers from buying SIM cards from other service providers by offering them
more appealing rates, product bundles and proactive roaming offerings based on travel patterns.

Rotational churn identification: Identifying and preventing mobile subscribers that disconnect and reconnect their
service in order to take advantage of promotions that only apply to new customers.

Churn location: Identifying and sending more appealing offers or even contacting subscribers located in areas that
have a higher churn rate.

4. Social Network Analysis

SNA sweeps through the billions of daily data transactions and identifies and helps segment influencers and
patterns among social calling circles of friends and families. Combining this information with the data from the
network, for example the CDR and CRM systems, service providers can process that data in both a defensive and
offensive manner to help with overall customer experience enhancement, churn reduction and revenue growth.
 5. Intelligent Network Planning
Service providers need network planning solutions that are embedded with advanced analytics to federate and
correlate information from multiple network data repositories, as well as sales forecasting systems, such as CRM.
This will provide operators with:

 The ability to plan, predict and optimize their investment in network build and rollout, identify
potential stress points
 Prioritized and optimal network investment plan based on service forecast demands
 The ability to anticipate and implement necessary network change just ahead of the demand curve

6. Cell-Site Optimization
Cellular networks are intended to be increasingly self-optimizing, with cells automatically managing how they
interact with one another (adjusting their power to minimize interference, while maximizing bandwidth and
coverage), managing their power consumption and how they load balance traffic and handover traffic between
cells. They will be able to do this much more effectively if they can augment the network performance with
contextual information, which includes subscriber information such as user experience in specific areas, how that
user experience varies according to the different types of services they might use and typical patterns of user
behaviour throughout the day.

7. Congestion Control
Radio access network (RAN) congestion has emerged as a major problem for mobile operators. Solutions that
incorporate subscriber information with their services and location information can provide visibility at individual
sub-cell level and provide priority to certain subscribers based on their tiers, etc., when they are moving across
certain cells that are suffering from congestion issues. Since congestion events are often fleeting, making use of
historical information about congestion to pre-empt similar problems and deploying RAN congestion only in those
areas where congestion is anticipated is a key area where operators are planning to utilize big data and analytics
solution.

8. Telco Operational Analytics

Another key area of application is the use of big data around driving internal efficiencies, process improvements
and cost savings around the core Telco operations. Telcos are starting to adopt big data solutions powered by
Hadoop for everything from plugging and minimizing revenue leakage, managing network and cyber security,
driving down order-to-activation lead-times to proactively identifying and fixing customer issues in order to
minimize truck rolls. Some of the more prominent use cases include:

9. Revenue leakage, Fraud detection & Revenue Assurance

Leveraging Hadoop and big data solutions enables the Service Providers to examine and plug dozens of actual or
potential leakage points through the network and customer-facing systems, and to correct data before it reaches
the billing system. Hadoop based solutions can help Service Providers to process and analyse both structured and
unstructured data going back several years, rather than just a few months, enabling them to gain a better
understanding of the behaviour of customers. Crucially, Hadoop has made it cost-effective to detect fraud and
revenue leaks, as well as identify new revenue opportunities.
 10.Cyber Security & Information Management
Cyber security is the greatest threat for Telcos as they race to ensure their networks and associated systems are
secure from malicious attacks. Legacy event detection capabilities are unable to collect and analyse all the data
sources necessary for identifying & responding to advanced threats due to the sheer cost and complexity. Security
professionals need to be able to access and analyse huge bulk of data in real-time in order to mitigate risk, detect
incidents, and respond to breaches. The Hadoop based data hubs can provide a cost-effective platform for storage
and advanced analytics capabilities to support deep packet analysis, behaviour analytics and profiling and threat
modelling.

11.Data Monetization and Data Analytics as a Service (DAaaS)

Content Service Providers (CSP) have unique advantage in that they have access to a wide variety and ever-
increasing valuable sources of data including subscriber demographics, subscriber location, network usage, devise,
application usage, preferences etc. Analytics of this data can be of significant value to other businesses and
verticals including retail, financial services, advertising, healthcare, public services and other customer-facing
businesses. There is a wide variety of application and use cases for data centric analytics ranging from - customer
footfall analytics which is helping retail chains decipher who is visiting their stores and when, to assisting cities
understand their traffic patterns and bottlenecks, helping logistics companies fine tune their delivery processes
and aiding advertising companies offer targeted campaign and advertising for specific micro segments. There are
significant opportunities and enthusiasm in this space and companies will look to accelerate their revenue share
from analytics services in the future. Though privacy is still a concern, if executed right, there are endless
opportunities to effectively monetize customer insights by making it relevant to other businesses and verticals
without compromising on subscriber privacy and rights.

12.IoT
According to industry sources, the number of connected objects representing the IoT ecosystem is expected to
reach 50 Billion by 2020. As data volumes from IoT are expected to increase at an accelerated pace, CSPs, due of
their inherent proximity to data generated, can play a dominant role across the value chain from collecting the
streaming data, to processing, storing, analysing and serving intelligence back to their end customers. More
importantly, they have the ability to add location based and geo-spatial elements to the streaming data to enrich
the insights of the data coming so that it can provide valuable insights to the enterprise verticals. Companies are
leveraging Hadoop as the ideal platform to collect, store, secure, manage and analyse data sets in real-time. IoT
concepts including connected homes, connected cars, e-health and smart cities, and the demand for data
management and analytics services will only continue to grow as these offerings mature.

References:
http://bigdata-madesimple.com/11-interesting-big-data-case-studies-in-telecom/
http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/power/casestudies/services/ufone_analytics/?page=3
http://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/03/3-telecom-developments-which-impact-iot-analytics.html