The customer base in North America for telecommunications carriers has a dual reality. While the penetration rate in the U.S. has reached over 120 percent, the Canadian market still shows room for growth. To drive revenue in such a landscape, carriers must focus on maximizing the potential within their existing customer base. A unique opportunity lies with customer smartphones and the valuable data they possess.
The bundling opportunity
Around one third of Canadian households and up to 78 percent of U.S. households donโt bundle their broadband and mobile services. This presents an opportunity: to capture customers who are subscribed for one service (broadband or TV) and upsell them a mobile plan.
Conventional customer engagement channels might not suffice, but the mobile device itself would be the perfect culprit to pursue this, directly on the carrierโs mobile app. This is for two reasons:
1. Data shows that customers are already active on mobile apps. Around 66 percent of U.S. smartphone users have a brand-specific app for shopping, and 70 percent have made a payment via a mobile device.
2. As many as 80 percent of a carrierโs customers have the carrierโs mobile app installed on their devices, for either broadband or wireless services, suggesting consumers are highly accessible through this channel.
The missing factor to enhance these efforts and encourage existing customers to bundle up mobile wireless services is personalization. In fact, 70% of customers expect personalization as technology advances. And personalization in ecommerce can increase conversion rates by nearly 300 percent.
To achieve this, carriers require two sets of data:
a) CRM information
b) Data from the customerโs mobile device to make contextualized and personalized offers
This second element, known as โmobile device intelligence,โ is a multi-variable form of customer intel.
What is mobile device intelligence?
Mobile device intelligence involves gathering and analyzing critical data points from mobile devices, such as IMEI numbers, diagnostic performance or configuration information. This data plays a critical role in device lifecycle management by providing carriers with the insights necessary for smarter decision-making throughout a customerโs device lifecycle, such as driving contextual marketing offers at key points. In our example, the carrierโs on-device customer service app serves as the conduit for collecting this kind of intelligence.
To source this data, carriers require digital on-device assessment tools embedded within their apps. These tools can mine information from the mobile device, which can then be translated into actionable insights to better address a customerโs specific needs.
How does this look in practice?
To better understand this, we can imagine a customer who has a broadband subscription with a telecoms service provider but no mobile wireless subscription. The customer is accessible, but directly addressing them with conventional marketing is difficult and more impersonal. Mobile device intelligence changes that.
In the following scenario, a customer owns a smartphone with a competing wireless service provider while subscribing to broadband services from a large tier-1 telecommunications carrier. By pulling the IMEI and make and model information from the mobile device, the carrier can gain valuable insight into the customerโs situation. This data reveals two key pieces of information: the approximate age of the mobile device and its type (i.e., an iPhone 15.)
Market data indicates that most customers replace their devices every two to three years, suggesting that this customer may be ready for an upgrade. Armed with mobile device intelligence data points, the carrier can send a personalized push notification offering the customer a trade-in for their iPhone 15 for an iPhone 18. This approach can not only secure a new customer, but also generate new revenue.
Building a successful program to encourage bundling with wireless mobile services requires the right tools and partner. MCE empowers carriers with the advanced digital technologies on its dDLM platform to extract mobile device intelligence, offering deeper insights into customersโ device lifecycles and enabling smarter decisions. Learn more about how mobile device intelligence can help carriers to unlock new opportunities and drive growth.
