How can Telcos Overcome their Business Challenges

by Buana Sari Digital Marketer

Telcos are facing constant change and battling multiple challenges. Impact of the global pandemic, OTT intrusion, mounting data pressures, service cannibalization, are just a few challenges that must be overcome by telcos to thrive.

Mobile Operators have seen a fall in ARPU and profitability. Traditional data and voice services have been stagnating. For many telcos new revenue streams have not grown fast enough to meet the shortfall. Difficulty in minimizing costs and innovating have made the matter worse. Operators are experiencing tough competition from new as well as existing competitors.

Consumer demands are evolving rapidly across all industries, and the telcos are no exception. The emerging sense of disappointment among customers is resulting in high levels of customer churn. In these uncertain times, customers are expecting personalized, automated, interactive and instant communication more than ever. They are longing for better products, faster and seamless services with immediate resolutions to issues.

Telcos are desperately looking for better ways to combat the challenges which is a daunting task. Telecoms are realigning their business strategies to meet changing customer demands and stay on top of the situation. Many have embarked on journeys to digitization and transformation.

In its 2022 telecom survey, Ericsson found that an average mobile user on average needs 4.1 days and 2.2 attempts to complete an interaction with a telco brand. A one-day delay in accomplishing an action result in a 30 percent decline in customer satisfaction. Only one-third of survey respondents believe that their telecom brands completely understand their needs as a customer. In addition, 46 percent of customers feel that their telecom service provider is hiding behind ‘bad’ technology offering impersonal contact forms, poor responses, and do-not-reply emails.

Several telecom majors have found out agile and decisive ways to solve their issues by entering into strategic alliances with marketing & transformation technology partners like moLotus. With traditional marketing channels being almost dead and consumers emerging as market-makers, disruptive technologies like moLotus are transforming the global telecommunication industry.

Let’s take a look at the kind of challenges that telcos are facing and learn how to overcome them:

1. Enhancing Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

Growing revenue by increasing average revenue per subscriber (ARPU) together with increasing subscribers is one of the classic telecom business challenges. Some mobile operators have reported growth in both the number of subscribers and ARPU for multiple quarters and even multiple years, but this is difficult to sustain particularly when the market becomes saturated.

Experts say that telcos should treat customers better and add breakthrough marketing technologies like moLotus in their marketing-mix. By doing so they can engage customers better, offering more value, and assisting them get the maximum out of products at every stage of buyer journey with telcos leading to ARPU upliftment.

Surveys reveal that several telcos across the globe are heading towards a hike of 2 to 4 percent in ARPU after adding moLotus to their marketing-mix. Via moLotus shadow marketing they are executing their existing marketing campaigns achieving superior customer response and that too at lower cost - all adding to ARPU. moLotus driven upsells, cross-sells, add-ons campaigns maximize customer lifetime value, increasing ARPU.

2. Effective Digital Transformation

Telcos have been plagued by silos and complexities in legacy customer & business processes inhibiting them from innovating at speed. This requires a firm strategy for digitizing, transforming and automating processes. With the acceleration of IoT and 5G and inflow of disruptive technologies, telcos are undergoing digital transformation enhancing customer experience. The pandemic has further accelerated digital disruption that was already in full swing, creating the need for customer-centric products and services and greater efficacy.

Digital Transformation in telecom sector involves intelligently re-imagining the processes using tools like moLotus; ensuring high margin revenues with speed, agility and cost savings. Telcos have tried out several technologies like SaaS, PaaS, cloud offerings, low code platforms, and the open source softwares for digital transformation in the past. Research shows that they have not achieved the desired outcomes using most of them adding to their woes.

moLotus powered breakthrough transformation is empowering the telcos by automating and transforming customer processes like customer onboarding, document submission, payment & service reminders, contract/policy renewals, loyalty, and many more. With moLotus breakthrough transformations, more telcos are entering into the modern digital landscape, exceeding customer expectations and improving overall customer experience at lesser costs & higher returns.

3. Customer Communication and Engagement

Communicating with customers has been a major challenge for telecom players all over the world. They often fail to grab the attention of their customers and interact with prospective customers.

Hyper-personalisation is now the most preferred way of communication especially with telecom customers who prefer tailored products and services. Telocs should send personalized recommendations, offers and messages to customers drawing quick attention and rapid action. Next-gen marketing technologies like moLotus have become the prime choice of big telcos using massive customer databases, Artificial Intelligence, and advanced algorithms to precisely personalize marketing campaigns.

Emails and social media are losing importance as telcos have got superior technology and platform for brand-customer interaction. Interacting and intriguing with subscribers is now simpler and quicker with moLotus mobile video customer interaction platform and technology. Telcos can interact with subscribers not only about their products and services, but also their innovative and contextual usages of them helping in building consumer confidence.

Telecoms can create informative and interactive advertising campaigns with easy response options including SMS, USSD, Call back, URL Click, etc. using moLotus. Also, the platform offers a wide variety of multimedia formats including video, slideshow, brochure, greetings, and showcases for enhancing visual communication. Telco marketers can add product pictures, voice-over and music, creating fascinating storyboards and HI videos up-to 40 sec.

4. Lead generation

Lead generation has mostly posed a challenge for global telco businesses. In the last few years advertising platforms like moLotus, Facebook, AdRoll, Marketo, HubSpot, etc. have come to the rescue of telecom brands. Now most telcos see moLotus as the most cost-effective way of generating and converting leads.

moLotus lead generation campaigns have proved to be more effective in getting leads. The campaigns created using platforms like moLotus can quickly prompt customers to share their contact info like name, address, number, etc. instantly. The non-spammy nature of moLotus 40 sec. HQ videos assist telco businesses to not only attract more leads for their products and services but also convert them into actual sales.

Lead generation capabilities of moLotus are further enhanced by a wide spectrum of attributes like hyper-personalization, automation, interactivity, customization, scalability, integration and more. No app, no data plan involved in the process!

5. Customer Retention

For telcos, existing customers are significantly more likely to spend more on their products and services than the new customers. They are more likely to become brand advocates and recommend the brand to their acquaintances. Escalating customer retention by five percent can increase revenue by between twenty-five and ninety-five percent.

However, customer retention is said to be one of the toughest marketing challenges for telecom businesses. Telecom Strategists are of the opinion that retention depends on having the right marketing tools in the telco marketing mix.

As a part of a customer retention strategy, telecom businesses must incentivise and delight their loyal customers with special offers, vouchers, discounts coupons. In return they can request them to leave reviews or upsell and cross-sell them. It would be appropriate for telco marketers to run automated loyalty campaigns via mobile advertising platforms like moLotus. It has a key role to play in generating customer loyalty by creating unique loyalty-based campaigns. The campaigns are delivered to the customer’ inbox irrespective of the phone type; meant for special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries and festivals. Further, they are custom-branded with options for names, greetings, rewards, call-to-actions (CTAs) for individual customers.

6. Cost Minimization

Escalating costs has become the biggest challenge for global telcos. Overheads for telecom operators around the world are already high. And according to experts, costs look set to rise further, mounting greater pressure on margins at a time when the telecom industry can hardly handle any additional financial burden. Nevertheless, experts suggest that telecom operators can certainly reduce costs by at least 15 to 30 percent using marketing and transformation technologies like moLotus.

For telcos in search of a cost-effective marketing platform, moLotus is an economical and efficient alternative. moLotus has led to the creation of effective advertising campaigns on a small budget. Platforms like Facebook and Google, which used to be the choice of telco marketers, are gradually losing their appeal due to mounting costs and low marketing ROI. It is an ideal option for telco businesses to reach consumers on their mobile phones at a lesser cost without requiring any application download or data plans.

moLotus breakthrough transformations can automate and digitize entire telco marketing processes; lowering the cost of tele calling, training, compliance, printing and delivery, etc.

7. Targeting Right Customers

Telcos often struggle to get a complete understanding of the target market that will allow their businesses to achieve overall better revenue results. It is challenging for them to gain insight into the target market’s demographics.

Marketing technology like moLotus gives telcos the ability to target audiences based on demography and language to ultimately generate more revenue. With language-based and demographic segmentation, telecom operators can channelize their marketing efforts in specific regions of the world.

With moLotus campaigns, telecom businesses are capable of targeting different demographics and languages. Telecom brands can target specific customers they perceive are likely to buy their product and services. Customer data such as age and interests is extensively used to customize campaigns according to customer requirements.

8. Increasing Reach & Scalability

Reaching more customers has always been a challenge for telcos. Marketing campaigns delivered by traditional platforms are unable to offer the kind of scalability needed to cater for the growing tech-savvy customers. Fortunately, some innovative digital technologies and platforms like moLotus, InMobi, AdRoll, HubSpot have come to the rescue of telco marketers offering globally scalable campaigns.

Telecom players now prefer new-age tools like moLotus which offer the much needed massive reach and scalability. The innovative technology instantly delivers automated messages to huge telco customer data directly into their inbox on all mobile phones, irrespective of type or model.

Conclusion

Every telco has a unique set of challenges that need to be addressed with intelligence and care. Telecom operators have to face them applying creativity and ingenuity. With tenacity and forethought, there is no challenge that cannot be resolved. Embracing new technologies could be the panacea to all the major challenges and boosting growth and revenues.