Amit Sanyal, Assistant Vice President and Joint Head for the Consumer Value Solutions business shares his views on Mahindra Comviva’s CXM strategy in Latin America. He also highlights the best practices and key challenges in this space.
The Latin American telecom space is characterized by multi-sim cards per customer and marginally declining ARPUs and EBITDA.
In this context, CXM tools such as data analytics attain centre stage.
Trends in the Latin American Market
It’s all about customer experience, let’s look at telecom. If you look at Latin America, it is not one country, it is not even a group of countries its split into parts of America, Central America and Caribbean , if you take North America there is a dispute but it starts from Mexico downwards so that’s LATAM. Overall the group of 20 countries, see majorly Spanish speaking, except in Brazil the teledensity in most countries is significantly high, if you look at sims per subscriber, how many sims does a person carry, that is a good indication of how crowded that market is in terms of penetration of mobile. In LATAM, specifically in North America and South America specifically Mexico, the sims per subscriber is over two, so every guy more or less carry two sims. Maybe two handsets or two sims in same handset.
Part two, look at what is happening to the average revenue per user , if I look at data from past four to six quarter , it is either flat or marginally declining, if I look from the acquisition, how much they are acquiring . The growth rate is at 10 percent, leave telecomm look at the geopolitical indicators – GDP is okay, now people have money when everyone is talking about data, growth of mobile because the sims per subscriber is so high. If I can boil down customer experience management, the customer is spending money, he may not be spending on you, so the big question for the telecomm sector is not that how I get him to spend more, how do I divert spend pattern to my networks.
If I have a choice, multiple choice what the other party has better from the previous party. Most operators tend to think it as trans war. The extent to which you can cut your bills, mobile tariffs, data tariffs , there is a flaw. Now what happens that you have brought down your diaries, if I look at the profitability of operators, it is medium to high. But the percentages are stagnant, declining maybe marginally. Price war is not the answer. Only answer is you put up an ecosystem in place, a connected field of ecosystem players. You will improve customer experience and focus on intelligent consumer analytics. If I do that I have another proposition apart from the price, as an operator I am happy I am not touching my price table.
Customer experience management has expanded, it is customer experience plus consumer behavior understanding. There is tremendous amount of data that is available. Is the telecomm industry able to mine through data that is available to drive what I call, convert data into actionable insights. How do I convert that data into tangible revenue generating actionable insight and that’s where analytics, big data, real time marketing comes.
