How Much Can Companies in the Telecommunications Industry Benefit from Big Data?

For a couple of years, established communication operators such as Orange, Vodafone, and AT&T have been involved with leveraging data analysis to refine their operational processes for analyzing consumer information, creating adequate marketing strategies, optimizing service quality, in other to provide customers with quality services while maximizing profit.

While the big industry giants in the telecommunications industry have embraced the use of big data in their day to day decision making processes, much smaller industry players have shunned or side-stepped its use, after weighing the cost involved with setting up the needed infrastructures for gathering big data, hiring professional analyzers and extracting the needed information. The obstruction of cost—for setting up a big data department—which is quite substantial, should be seen as negligible when compared to the advantages acquiring accurate information on your customers and the ability to predict future consumer trends will have on the overall productivity of any telecoms organization.

The Importance of Big Data in Telecommunications

Big data is definitely set to increase the efficiency and productivity of all operators across the Communication Service Providers (CPS) chain which includes; the mobile telecommunication niche, the wire/wireless industry, internet providers and Satellite operability in the following ways:

• Forecasting—in telecommunication covers three major aspects which are analyzing gathered data to; predict future consumption trends, find errors and understanding market consumption. In this regard, big data provides analysts with ample tools to accurately predict changes in these three major areas to a very high degree of accuracy.
• Cross Chanel Insights—organizations in other industries—citing Google as an example—have utilized data analysis and big data to understand how internet consumers interact online. These organizations have successfully used big data to track consumers browsing patterns from the first click of a mouse to the logout stage. This can be transferred to the telecommunications industry, by studying the processes in-between a consumer’s purchase of air-time, to his or her calling patterns. The data gotten through this process can then be used to optimize consumption, track crime as well as develop better marketing campaigns.
• Understanding User Patterns Through Mobile Use—the high penetration levels of the use of mobile devices—which cuts across several platforms such as the internet and social media use—happens to be one of the highest real-time data generation machinery in today’s fast paced world. Effectively analyzing the big data mobile operators generate, goes a long way in recording user location, speed of communication movement and storing biometric data which can be analyzed to optimize routing, network quality and user traffic.
• Designing Specialized Marketing Campaigns—gathering and analyzing the data coming from the mobile phone and smart device community, helps mobile operators and even mobile application developers create marketing strategies, campaigns and Ads, that will appeal to their target customer base. Apple is an example of a major telecommunications giant that utilizes big data to plan the creation of its text and video Ads as well as their distribution to achieve maximum impact.
• Social Media Analytics—as time elapses and technology advances, more and more citizens of the world, now communicate through the use of social media platforms. Facebook is the perfect example of this trend of online communication for it recently recorded a billion active users on its systems, Twitter also hit the 100 million mark and these trends goes to show that understanding social media through big data can help business both in the telecommunications industry and others develop insights into the behavioral patterns of public consumers.
• Revenue Generation—Although generating revenue by selling consumer data is seen as illegal in some communities, the near future is sure to see an increase in generated revenues in the telecoms industry through the sale of big data.

Big data provides every industry with the opportunities to develop unique business strategies to ensure their growth and the telecommunication industry is no different. Incorporating these opportunities into a company’s business processes is sure to provide it with a competitive edge against slower competitors.

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