Industry Leader in Telecom Data Analytics and Revenue Assurance

In the modern hyper-connected world, telecom networks are the backbone of the digital age, keeping us connected in our personal lives and running essential businesses and services. But disruptions like fraud, outages, or dropped calls can cause some serious headaches to both the service provider and their customers.

Traditionally, anomalies within telecom networks were only uncovered at the end of each billing cycle, if detected at all, requiring analysts to comb through seas of data. But now thanks to Machine Learning (ML), we can process and analyze huge stacks of data records to spot trends, detect suspicious outliers, and create connections that humans may have overlooked.

In this blog post, we'll explore how our Event Storage & Analytics Platform (ESAP) puts statistical analysis and machine learning to work for telecom companies, unlocking valuable insights that were previously hidden within their data.

Predicting customer churn holds a key role in helping telecom companies effectively retain customers. The expense associated with acquiring new customers far outweighs the cost of retaining existing ones. That's why voice providers are diving into AI to identify customers who might be considering switching to another service and take proactive measures.

Amid ongoing shifts in the telecom industry, better-priced deals and packages are driving more people to switch carriers, leaving providers at times feeling powerless as they witness waves of customer departures.

With the recent push for government broadband spending, the number of competing providers in previously uncontested areas is on the rise. Every small to mid-sized provider is aware of this, but many still don’t have a way to proactively prevent churn and retain customers.

Data analytics used to be a buzzword that many thought was only in reach of the big players in telecom. As new approaches to data in broadband become more available, CSPs are taking the necessary steps to turn their data into meaningful analytics, while others are playing catch up to not fall behind. 

In this blog, we’ll go over the ways we’ve been leveraging data with our Event Storage and Analytics Platform (ESAP) modules to help providers with churn and marketing support, and detect fraud using analytics. 

Tell me if this story sounds familiar. You have an idea, a hunch, a theory that you'd like to 'flush' out. BUT, in order to do so, you need access to data from last month, maybe it's CDRs, billing data, smart meter data, etc. The emails, conference calls, and requests you'll have to make to get your hands on that data are daunting at best. But it's your data right? Why should you have to jump through so many hoops to get access to it? By the time you can even figure out who "owns" the data, you're onto the next task and your great idea is wasted, yet again.

Over the years, I can't tell you how many times the 'data access' issue has delayed or even completely stopped a project we've been involved with. Not because the idea didn't make sense or the business case didn't prove out, simply because getting the data from 'Point A' to 'Point B' was going to take too much time and effort. This is the definition of a 'data plumbing' issue. Big data tools are getting better, faster, cheaper, and more available every day. But the challenge of extracting and integrating data from a variety of sources has become an issue that organizations simply can't ignore. It's the ugly truth behind data analytics - it often takes more time and energy to extract, clean, and integrate the data than it takes to do the analytics itself.

Cloud storage has been around since the 1960s, but it’s only in recent years that we’re beginning to understand and deploy the technology to its full potential. For telcos coming to grips with the advantages of having access to big data, the cloud offers a range of benefits.

Cost Benefit

Cloud storage has become cheaper over the years, with giant providers like Google and Amazon able to leverage economies of scale and keep the market competitive. Since data sets are likely to get bigger as time goes by, managing the cost of storage is crucial to enable companies to remain competitive in their target markets. Using the cloud results in lower operating costs, reduced overheads, and lower hardware and maintenance expenses.

Big data is big news in almost every industry, and telecom is no exception. The report “Big Data and Telecom Analytics Market: Business Case, Market Analysis & Forecasts 2014 – 2019” from Mind Commerce forecasts a 50% growth by 2019 in the big-data-driven telco analytics environment, which will deliver annual revenue of $5.4 billion. Apart from opening up a multitude of jobs for telecom data scientists, data will increasingly become a competitive differentiator for telcos.  

The most common issue we run into when beginning work with a new customer, whether they are a telecom or cable company, is gaining access to data records.  Call detail records (CDRs) and IP detail record (IPDRs) contain an enormous wealth of information that can be used to drive KPIs and analytics for almost any part of the business including operations, marketing, regulatory, revenue assurance, etc.  Unfortunately, we find that that majority of the time these data records are owned by a specific department and gaining access to them can take weeks, months, or in some cases even longer.  As a solutions provider, this can obviously be frustrating.  But when an internal group has the same issues accessing its own data, it can be downright debilitating and ultimately impact customer experience and revenue.