Telcos should make the most of their big data gold mine

Telcos should make the most of their big data gold mine

31 July 2017


 July 31, 2017

We try to explain in three points why telcos should make the most of their big data gold mine and why there is a real return on investment on their immediate action.

Price drops in big data technologies, cloud services and storage disks “have made it possible to store huge datasets”, with companies now able to “keep hundreds of terabytes and even petabytes of data forever”.

But what is the benefit of keeping all this data, especially for Telecom Operators? Is there a real ROI for all the trouble?

Here is the answer in 3 bullet points:

1. Understand the past, be more efficient

It is a no-brainer, keeping historical data enables companies to understand the past. For Telecom Operators this means to be able to diagnose outages faster and therefore help a call centre be more efficient.

The Time-to-Resolution or TTR, is one of the key metrics call centres to follow closely and TTR is directly related to customer satisfaction. The faster the time to resolution of a call, the more satisfied the client. Keeping historical data on all customers can therefore clearly help with better TTR indicators.

By accessing historical data on a client, customer service operators can see when problems have occurred in the past: dropped connections, macro blocs, memory leak, wifi configuration issues, interferences… Most of the time, a client who experiences intermittent Internet connection drops has no problem when he calls the call centre.

In which case, the call centre operator will have difficulties understanding the issue. The client is frustrated and the TTR is long. With historical data, the problem would have been easily identified. The historical data helps to qualify the level of an incident the client is experiencing and decrease TTR.

2. Understand the evolution patterns

In understanding evolution patterns, moving average variations and peak data changes are essential. Historical data enables the tracking of improvement over time which gives key insights. These insights are essential for driving a business.

Marketers are always on the run to better understand and segment the customers. Keeping historical data can help marketers understand if their customer segment is changing. This helps them adapt to their customers with new offers.

For example, having a concrete understanding of historical and present VoD usage and the variation, Telecom Operators can increase the resources for each OTT service so that the quality experience remains enjoyable.

3. Enable big data forecasting

The big data technology makes it possible to analyse past data to forecast future events. But to do so, the forecasting algorithms rely on large historical data sets. Thus storing historical data is a prerequisite.

Based on billions of calculations and data points over the past events, big data now makes it possible to forecast and predict events. Knowing the weather for the next few days or predicting consumer behaviour becomes easy.

For example, for Telecom Operators this means taking advantage of this technology to be proactive in problem resolution, predicting if in the future a customer’s television broadcast will fail based on macroblock variation calculations.


These “three key points” are the main reasons  Telecom Operators should start keeping their historical data as soon as possible, in order to be able to provide higher quality service and appropriate offers to their clients, now and in the future.


Leave a Reply
