Centralized BI Creates a Competitive Edge for Telcos
The telecommunication industry faces many challenges in terms of competition, regulations, technology shifts, constant innovations, and customer demand for new features and services. One of the challenges facing telco companies is the difficulty to gain insights from all the data they generate.
Telco enterprises generate huge amounts of data from mobile phone usage, call detail records, network equipment, billing information, server logs and the growing connectivity of the subscribers and users.
Analyzing this data by using a centralized BI tool provides telcos with a competitive advantage. They will be able to improve overall network performance, optimize service levels, minimize overhead costs and maximize profitability by ensuring customer loyalty.
The use of BI will enable an enterprise to stay ahead of competitors and always anticipate customer needs. BI allows organizations to make data-driven decisions about investments in order to achieve targeted profit margins. The enterprise will achieve a unified view of data even if it comes from multiple data sources and departments. Users can analyze and view data in beautiful dashboards that are easy to understand. They can also collaborate with colleagues, enrich the data with comments and annotations, and get notified when there are changes or anomalies in the data. Because of these and other benefits, BI is a top priority for many Telco companies.
According to Gartner, global spending on cloud and smart data technologies and solutions will grow to $3.8 trillion by 2019. Out of that sum, $1.45 trillion is targeted at communications services. Another report, “Global Data Analytics Market in Telcom Industry”, states that the telco industry’s use of data analytics tools is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 28.28% until 2018.
The secret to success, especially in a Telco enterprise, is connection. Telcos generate data in different departments and need to somehow merge it and find correlated insights in it. This is impossible to do with federated BI. Federated means each department is working by itself. Each user works on his desktop. By working in desktops, the insights they find stay only in their domain, so other departments can’t learn from them. Not only that, but not everyone in the organization sees the same version of the data. Different users see different numbers and different insights, leading to multiple versions of the “truth”. Eventually, what starts as a project for data analysis and insights turns into data chaos and Excel Hell.
That’s why Telco organizations need to move to a centralized BI model. Centralized is connection. All users can work in a unified web solution, where the data is updated in real-time and they all see the same version of the truth. Using a centralized BI tool, users can analyze data from different departments like marketing, finance, customer service, sales and engineering. With well-set data permissions and restrictions, departments can share resources and insights. This creates a holistic analysis, where everyone shares a single version of the truth and everyone can benefit from each other’s findings, instead of them being siloed in separate departments and desktops.
Centralized BI allows users to do modeling of different scenarios. They can analyze different data sources to determine avoidable truck rolls, improve customer experience, find ways to lower service costs, and create data-driven expansion strategies. Users can also monitor core business processes and KPIs. Panorama Necto even sends automatic alerts to a user’s email whenever the data of the KPI they are following changes.
The possibilities are endless. But we would like to highlight some more benefits in two main areas that concern Telco companies: the customer and the network.
