The 2nd All-Russia Case-Conference Operators’ Loyalty Marketing & Big Data Management was held on May 16th in Moscow at Expocentre Fairgrounds. It was the final big event on the business agenda of the 26th International Exhibition for Telecommunications, Control Systems, IT and Communications Services Sviaz-Expocomm 2014.
Participants of the Case-Conference – telecom customer experience management professionals shared their expertise in CRM, innovative approaches to loyalty programs and practices of implementing IT solutions, which can enhance cost-efficiency of the projects, through case studies, brainstorming discussions and talk show.
Microsoft Corporation, a global leader in information technologies, was Golden sponsor of the Case-Conference Operators’ Loyalty Marketing & Big Data Management. Coffee breaks and lunch were sponsored by Nanosemantics – a leader of the Russian industry of artificial intelligence for business. The event was endorsed by the Association of Customer Loyalty and Customer Centricity (KLIK), created to further the market of loyalty programs and customer experience management and assist in the development of professional code of ethics and standards. The event was also supported by the Russian Association for Electronic Communications and the national E-commerce Association (AKIT). J'son & Partners Consulting was analytical partner of the Case-Conference. The event was also supported by numerous specialized industry media.
The first block, dedicated to the best practices of subscriber retention, was kicked off by Elena Naumchik, Founder of KLIK Association. Her keynote speech was an analysis of changes in telecom operators’ loyalty programs and the after-math of the introduction of mobile number portability (MNP) in Russia, which propelled customer-focused developments. Elena Naumchik stressed that all major players in the Russian telecom market are committed to improving transparency of their tariffs and services, branching out into related industries and bringing new products to the market, and they also actively invest into CRM and customer marketing technologies, including Big Data solutions.
Head of Sales and Service Department of TTK Oleg Leonov presented his vision of which functions of loyalty management operators can and must outsource. In his opinion, outsourcing is especially effective with generic, non-unique tools of loyalty management, such as contact centers, online service management, and running corporate pages in social networks and discussion boards. The audience of the Case-Conference gave Oleg Leonov credit for the best report in the first block of the conference.
The first part of the event also featured reports from Head of Customer Support and Operations, Orange Business Services, Olga Baranova, Head of Subscriber Equipment Service, VimpelCom, Kristina Egorova, Consultant at Wireless Department of J'son & Partners Consulting Sergey Maltsev, and Project Manager at EPSI Russia & CIS Polina Rebeka. They addressed optimization of customer loyalty costs, discussed how to get customer feedback without putting too much pressure on them, analyzed global MVNO and MNP practices, and also touched upon using subsidized phones in pursuance of subscriber loyalty.
The first block of the Conference was followed by a practical case-study session, where Deputy PR Director of Rostelecom Olga Pestereva and CEO of Angel Relations Group Alexey Karlov urged carriers to monitor the online media field and engage more in the Internet environment, namely, using social networks to distribute information, while turning users of these resources into creators of new products and services.
The second block of the conference was dedicated to innovations in customer relations management, including the developments related to customer expectation management (CEM systems), business intelligence (BI) and Big Data Management. It featured such experts as Wildberries' CRM & Customer Analysis Director Maxim Mozgovoy, Business Solutions Expert from Microsoft Russia Vladimir Srednikov, Expert in CRM Solutions from GMCS Andrey Kuzhelev, Projects Director at Scartel (Yota) Sergey Volkov, Head of Corporate Products at Nanosemantics Lab Anna Zubkova, VimpelCom’s Project Portfolio Manager Sergey Marin, Head of Business Partner Relations from Mobilux (WhyFly) Ilya Vasiliev, and also Regional Strategic Marketing Manager from Nokia Vladimir Shaporov.
Vladimir Srednikov and Andrey Kuzhelev spoke about effective customer experience management using state-of-the-art contact centers and presented a Microsoft Dynamics CRM-based solution developed by GMCS company for contact centers. “We are entering the age of customers, and companies will have to adapt to the new customer/service provider reality”, emphasized Vladimir Srednikov. He said that to be able to control customer experience you first and foremost need to know your customer really well and have strong multichannel communications with them. According to Andrey Kuzhelev, the solution offered by GMCS allows aggregation of all customer feedback (from phone calls to SMS texts), enables subscriber’s instant automatic identification, and can be easily integrated with any reference and billing tools, at low cost.
Anna Zubkova analyzed customer satisfaction tools and optimization of loyalty costs through a communications fennel on a telecom service provider’s website. According to her, 80% customer requests are frequently asked and typical questions, which can be handled by a robot. Only 20% require involvement of a human specialist, and 15% can be resolved in the online mode, leaving only 5% which actually require a voice consultation by a call center operator. Service solution for telecom operator’s website proposed by Nanosemantics – online robot-consultant – provides for a 15% load decrease on contact center, while halving online information retrieval time, and increasing the website visit depth by 3.5 times. Such solutions have already been implemented by some major players, including MTS, Yota, NetByNet and VimpelCom.
Vladimir Shaporov introduced the audience to the capabilities of CEM technologies, and particularly, Nokia’s CEM Umbrella Solution for real-time assessment of subscriber loyalty index and improvement of operator’s performance throughout all their operations areas.
Finally, Sergey Marin shared VimpelCom’s experience in Big Data technologies, which the company used, namely, to evaluate service quality on a single subscriber level, develop on-demand infrastructure, according to customers’ needs, and devise relevant service proposals. His report was acknowledged to be the best in the second block of the conference.
The Case-Conference concluded with an open discussion dedicated to marketing and technological aspects of customer experience management.
In the course of the Case-Conference, its participants repeatedly mentioned that Operators’ Loyalty Marketing & Big Data Management is the only meeting point, where telecom industry professionals can exchange knowledge and insights on CEM.
