Today's consumers expect nothing but outstanding experiences. Digital-native companies such as TikTok, Uber and Amazon have set the bar for meeting that expectation, bringing a personalized, customer-centric, digital-first focus and creating new kinds of value with simple and transparent subscription business models. According to a newly released McKinsey study, 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are falling behind but there is hope

These digital-native IT giants have been seizing market share from communications service providers (CSPs) since 2014, and this has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, CSPs can win back some of that share and generate new kinds of value by transforming into DSPs — digital service providers — and going beyond connectivity to deliver new applications via new business models that take advantage of 5G capabilities such as network slicing.

In order to do this, DSPs will need to strategically prioritize the customer experience and increase their investment in cloud-based customer engagement tools. Analysys Mason’s October 2020 Customer Engagement Forecast projected CSPs will spend about $14 billion per year on customer engagement automation at least until 2025. Adopting modern, cloud-based engagement solutions will allow CSPs to tap into new 5G revenue streams and deliver an advanced digital experience for enterprises and consumers and enable them to keep up with the competition.

Critical factors for successful Customer Value Management (CVM)

A key question for the CSP of today is how to compete and win the hearts of their customers during this evolutionary period as they transition to DSPs and deploy their 5G networks. Through primary research, at Nokia we have identified a set of four critical factors for successful CVM: context, relevance, digital channels and ecosystems.

To capture the revenue opportunities available with 5G, CSPs need to improve their customer engagement systems for each of the four success factors above, getting away from the point or partial solutions of today.

The ideal for the DSP is to have a single software solution for CVM capable of delivering five key characteristics:

1. Simplicity and self-sufficiency so CVM teams can create and manage any customer value objectives over the entire customer lifecycle
2. The agility to create new customer value objectives (such as recommendations, promotions and ads) and launch them into the market quickly
3. Real-time engagement with customers in a contextual and personalized manner, made possible by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
4. Flexible use of all-digital channels — from mobile apps and mobile wallets to social media and self-service applications — with push and pull mechanisms for convenient engagement
5. The ability to build and launch innovative offerings with partners, co-creating end-to-end digital services and applications for an advanced digital experience.

Nokia's Recommendation Manager meets these needs

Nokia has developed its Monetization Recommendation Manager solution to meet these criteria: a customer value management interface that enables CSP CVM teams to design and manage customer value objectives in a simple and easy-to-configure way so they can get actions into the market faster.

Nokia Monetization Recommendation Manager correlates data from real-time CSP systems (e.g., charging systems) with subscriber information and relevant inputs from other business support systems (BSS) to launch automated, contextual and personalized engagement actions such as recommendations, promotions and ads in real time.

Our solution is purpose-built for CSP teams based on consultations and research that provides the full set of capabilities required to address all four critical factors of successful CVM: context, relevance, digital channels and ecosystems.

So what now?

By investing in meaningful, personalized, contextual and real-time customer engagement, CSPs can progress toward their strategic goal of becoming DSPs — delivering the kinds of experiences digital-native customers expect and competing effectively with digital-native service providers and internet companies, and Nokia is here to enable that.

For more information and to learn more about our Nokia Recommendation Manager solution download our full whitepaper, Deliver an exceptional digital experience; The keys to winning the hearts of digital-native customers here.