Published on the 30/03/2016 | Written by Bora Kizil, Julien Muller
Telcos are being forced to reinvent themselves and the founders of a French start-up, Bora Kizil and Julien Muller, say e-tail could hold the key…
In a market where churn is a crucial stake, operators must look to the latest technologies and knowledge to defend their market share. Analytics, predictions, recommendations and customisation are some of the innovations that have been used in e-commerce since the 1990s to sell the right service to the right customer, and which could be used by telcos to provide better video-on-demand services. Here are five key things that telecom operators can learn from successful e-commerce companies. In e-commerce: E-tailers use analytics tools to track their end users anonymously, and in real time: where they click, what pages they visit, how long they spend on each various page, what is their purchase funnel, etc. Tools like Google Analytics and Piwik are widespread, and enable websites to track their audience. How about in Telecommunications? A few agencies, Médiamétrie in France for instance, are able to recover audience data from a representative sample of the population. But today, we can do much better. If well managed, data could already enable operators to know the number of people connected within one household, the channels they watch, the time they spend channel-surfing, OTT and VOD consumptions, and even analyse the quality of the service provided by monitoring the WiFi connectivity ratios, or macroblock issues. Operators would not only be able to have a detailed view of the use of their network, but also of its condition. In addition, the data collected may be used to predict future outages, and thus help save on maintenance and customer service costs. In e-commerce: Major efforts are made to improve the compatibility of e-commerce website display with all the browsers on the market, as well as the various devices: PC, Mac, tablets and smartphones. Technologies such as HTML5 and responsive design techniques have been invented. How about in Telecommunications? For the operators, the last mile has always been a grey area and the source of many network problems. They install gateway and set-top boxes in end users’ homes to enable internet connection (ADSL, VDSL, fibre, cable, wi-fi), VoIP telephony and television (mainly IPTV or DVB) services. The brands and generations of this equipment are diverse and difficult to maintain remotely. This material diversity causes end-user frustration when using these services. Operators need to be able to track the problems and understand how to solve them. A last-mile monitoring tool can turn out to be very useful for this. In e-commerce: The interface and design of e-commerce websites changes regularly. It is usual to analyse the data to study the customer’s visiting path in order to constantly improve it, offering a better experience and quicker browsing. Thanks to this data, we know that the acceptable display time for a web page is between one and two seconds maximum. Any longer, and the visitor goes elsewhere. If Google’s display time is longer than half a second, it has 20 percent less traffic. How about in Telecommunications? Telecom operators could do the same by measuring the activity of end users and understanding how they use telecommunications, including video-on-demand. They could change the interfaces of their set-top boxes to make browsing easier, for example, to avoid too much clicking or to choose the best positions for the menus and redesign remote control short-cuts. In e-commerce: What could be better than a service that predicts what you want? Recommendation algorithms has been used by e-tailers for several years. Thirty percent of Amazon’s turnover is generated by recommendations. Seventy-five percent of Netflix’s traffic is generated by recommendations. Furthermore, Netflix invests significant funds in predictive technologies: $150 million per year! It is now the leader on the SVOD (subscription video-on-demand) market, and available in 190 countries. How about in Telecommunications? Despite some operator interest in recommendations, this is still few and far between. This tool is a real conversion lever, one which makes consumers’ lives easier and which operators would be wrong to ignore. There are numerous possibilities: whether it be to offer a selection of films in VOD, to counter the Netflix effect, or OTT services. The margin of progression and possible earnings for operators is high, as recommendations are a way to keep the end user interested in the services offered and improve their loyalty. In e-commerce: You have recently surfed online to find offers of holidays in Bora Bora. What do you see a few days later? Ads for holidays in Tahiti. These retargeting techniques are more or less well-accepted by consumers. If well-targeted and not overly intrusive, they will help to catch consumers who would have left without buying and help to double or even triple the conversion rates. How about in Telecommunications? Operators could also offer customised advertising on their boxes depending on the tastes of each customer, their media consumption, the films they watch and how they channel-hop. They could use this to better target advertising, offer new economic models and to ultimately offer a better service by increasing the conversion rates of their advertisers. ABOUT BORA KIZIL AND JULIEN MULLER// Ezako was formed in 2011 as a French startup by Bora Kizil and Julien Muller, currently based in Sophia-Antipolis near Nice. Ezako founders are two keen Big Data experts, a former IBM architect and a Google developer, who got together during an Open Data hackathon.
