 | Issue: | Africa and the Middle East 2014 |
| Article no.: | 12 | |
| Topic: | Fighting high churn rates and low ARPU | |
| Author: | Jean-Philippe Larvol | |
| Title: | Managing Director Africa | |
| Organisation: | Astellia | |
| PDF size: | 210KB |
About author
Jean-Philippe Larvol, Managing Director Africa, Astellia
After graduating from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Jean-Philippe Larvol started his career working for Alcatel-Lucent where he occupied various positions in Africa, including Sales and Country Manager.
In 2010, he joined Astellia as Managing Director Africa. He reinforced the Africa Sales team by creating a sales office in Johannesburg to ensure Astellia’s leadership in the African market.
Article abstract
Africa is the world’s fastest-growing region both in terms of mobile connections and unique mobile subscribers and still will be for the years to come.
Customer satisfaction is intimately linked to the mobile network’s performance. If a network suffers from outage, degradation or congestion, it will have a negative impact on the customer’s QoE hereby jeopardizing customer loyalty and revenue growth.
African operators have the same needs as those in other regions and CTO’s need a 360° visibility of the network efficiency, handset performance and subscriber usage and see how these interact with each other.
Full Article
By using network monitoring solutions, mobile operators can obtain a holistic view of the customer’s experience based on network performance, handset and service usage. Different teams can utilize this data to optimize network QoS, deliver a reliable and high-quality subscriber experience, decrease churn and boost revenues.
High potential market & fierce competition
The African telecommunications market presents immense opportunities for growth, particularly when looking at its moderate mobile penetration level (33% according to GSMA Intelligence), low data traffic volumes, the introduction of new payment methods. According to research by Informa Telecoms & Media, Africa’s mobile subscriptions will reach one billion before the end of 2015. The GSMA predicts that in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, the number of smartphone users will grow by 40% each year up to 2017. As data becomes more accessible through low-cost handsets, the appetite for data, mobile browsing, and the latest mobile apps is growing. This obviously offers huge opportunities for operators.
That said, competition in many markets is tightening up and leading to fierce price wars. As a consequence, high churn rates and low ARPU (ranging from US$2 to US$25 per month) are rife. Thus, competing solely on price is no longer enough of a differentiator. Telecoms.com 2014 industry survey confirms that operators see network quality, service pricing and customer service as the top three means of competitive differentiation.
African operators must not only ensure that their networks are prepared to cope with the continuous growth in demand and ensure a high quality of service, but they must also create compelling offers and services to attract and keep subscribers. They are, for instance, launching 0.facebook.com (a faster, lightweight version without any graphics or photos) to enable their subscribers to browse the popular social network site without incurring any data charges. They are also looking to expand activities with mMoney, mHealth, mLearning, mAgri.
The network, a key differentiator
Africa is the world’s fastest-growing region both in terms of mobile connections and unique mobile subscribers. New subscribers are increasingly likely to reside in rural areas. However, erratic power supplies and defective infrastructure in these rural areas are affecting network performance.
Customer satisfaction is intimately linked to the mobile network’s performance. If a network suffers from outage, degradation or congestion, it will have a negative impact on the customer’s QoE hereby jeopardizing customer loyalty and revenue growth.
African operators have the same needs as those in other regions and CTO’s need a 360° visibility of the network efficiency, handset performance and subscriber usage and see how these interact with each other.
Probe-based monitoring solutions are an important tool in providing this traffic visibility in order to maintain QoS and monetize network investments. Real-time insights gathered from these solutions allow optimization and engineering teams to quickly pinpoint issues affecting customer experience (e.g. undelivered SMS, call drops, video freezes, etc.) and quickly identify root causes.
These monitoring solutions can detect, analyze, correlate, report and troubleshoot issues which are linked to network and handset performance in order to deliver the best user experience.
Engineers can investigate problem root causes, fine tune radio access that is responsible for bottlenecks in 80% of cases, and identify low-performing network equipment. They can even identify subscribers that are receiving a poor data experience before they complain or churn and understand the root cause of the problem. This will allow the operator to deliver a superior broadband experience, enhanced voice quality, faster data speeds and so on to their subscribers.
By correlating for instance high-value subscribers and their frequent access points on the radio network, operations can make strategic decisions as to which part of the radio access network (RAN) should be optimized as a priority to improve accessibility and quality.
Subscriber intelligence for marketing and commercial teams
In addition to the traditional monitoring function of analyzing network performance, the data collected by probes can be used by marketing & commercial teams as well to help them meet their targets of improving subscribers’ satisfaction (Net Promoter Score), reducing churn and increasing ARPU.
Recent research, conducted across a selection of global operators by Mobilesquare and commissioned by Astellia, revealed that almost 60% of respondents do not have access to the right data and associated tools to make a truly informed business decision. In total, an average of 51% of mobile operators confirmed not being able to access important data related to their customer’s QoE.
However, getting a granular understanding of customer QoE and usage is strategic for marketing teams. Real-time network monitoring allows them to present the right offer at the right time to the right subscriber. This is even more important in the African market where mobile subscribers are highly price sensitive and have adopted SIM swapping strategies in order to access as many low-cost deals as possible. Indeed, cost-conscious African consumers hold two SIM subscriptions each on average.
Mobile operators have a large arsenal of pricing possibilities at their disposal to ensure customer retention based on subscriber usage: pay as you go, content defined (e.g. pay for access to Facebook or Mxit), time defined (hours, days), data allowance (50Mb – 50Gb), network speed (2G, 3G, 4G), etc. But monetization of data services requires a deep understanding of each subscriber’s usage – what, how, when and where they consume data. Network monitoring solutions provide this data and can then be used to determine the impact of a particular tariff plan on the network, the QoE enjoyed by the customer and the impact this had on its usage.
Further, this 360° holistic view of the subscriber can ensure mobile operators commercial teams to meet service level agreements (SLAs) for premium corporate customers, increase loyalty, identify and address network performance issues before they impact key corporate accounts and even prioritize bandwidth regardless of their location. It can also help companies swap devices with newer and more suitable handsets and monitor employee mobility and productivity with a view of encouraging increased data usage to drive revenues.
Handling customer complaints more efficiently
Customer service agents are under growing pressure to increase first call resolution (FCR) and to lower significantly the number of trouble tickets passed on to level 2/3 teams.
Monitoring solutions provide real-time information to service agents to understand the problems experienced by their customers and even allow them to diagnose if the subscriber is the only one impacted or if it is global to the cell. This key information helps operators in organizing resources and in prioritizing optimization activities based on the number of impacted subscribers.
Thanks to real-time simplified diagnosis and understandable information, customer service teams can easily identify the impacted services and root cause such as malfunctioning device, low performing network equipment, coverage and equipment or transmission problems.
One solution addressing multiple teams’ needs
By using one common monitoring solution and extracting the right data, network operations, marketing and customer care teams can hence take advantage of the embedded wealth of data they have of their customers and use insight and intelligence based on the same metrics to take business decisions and deliver a QoE that can turn down churn and drive ARPU.
The future looks bright
Africa is the world’s fastest-growing region both in terms of mobile connections and unique mobile subscribers and still will be for the years to come. Even if growth will start with voice and SMS before rural areas become matured enough to migrate to high speed broadband, urban Africa is already enjoying ubiquitous internet access through affordable smartphones. According to IDC, the addressable market for smartphone users is expected to double in the next four years, so building on the continent’s smartphone future is a pretty safe bet.
