What families have to say or not to TELCOS about personalized digital services

Eva Manrique López

Nowadays, Customer Analytics (CA) is presented as an essential technology for improving the customer experience in all marketing, sales and service channels. Forbes magazine considers the TELCO sector to be one of the industries with the greatest growth potential thanks to the use of CA technology.

Gone are the days when landlines were the only way for TELCO to reach families. Thanks to the emergence of mobile lines and increasingly advanced smartphones, today it is possible to offer personalized digital products in real time.

But what do we mean by personalized?

If we look at the definitions of “personalized” in the dictionary, we find the following:

• To have marked with one’s initials, name or monogram.
• To make personal, as by applying a general statement oneself.
• To design or tailor to meet an individual’s specifications, needs or preferences.

What all the definitions have in common is the concept of the individual. We can therefore deduce that personalized services are services that are tailored to the tastes of the individual.

Therefore, if companies offer services that are tailored to the tastes of the individual and also do so at the right time, it is possible to gain new customers and increase their revenue.

However, the facts show that, although companies are investing in these real-time customer analytics technologies, only 22% are successfully implementing strategies. FORBES

Could it be that we are missing something?

It is true that customer analytics is a major breakthrough. Thanks to this technology, you can even track an individual’s movements in real time. However, this technology still has some weaknesses.

The first weakness is that it is easy to use the individual as a unit of analysis. But when the individual is part of a system such as a family, the unit of analysis is the family group and many companies still lack adequately integrated analysis options. I assume that it is only a matter of time before companies manage to overcome this fragmentation barrier.

But there is still an even greater weakness for these technologies: the tacit. That which is silent, that is not expressed, that cannot be measured: for example, power relationships that affect the individual’s decision making or some of their behaviors within a family.

I will use an example of the latest research we have done at the NOVUM Design Research team:

A 65-year-old man who had a simple ADSL contract and a mobile line; his wife uses a prepaid mobile line. This man, let’s call him John, loves movies. But no matter how much he loves movies, he has never received a personalized offer to sign up for pay TV. One day he realized that his 40-year-old son had signed up for a service that offered him internet, two mobile lines and a TV package in a single plan. John decided to ask his son to help him get the same plan.

In years gone by, TELCO may only have had landlines to reach families. That may be because, at that time, it was understood that the landline was a service aimed at the whole family and not at an individual.

At the NOVUM Design Research team, we decided to study the influence of family relationships when signing up to TELCO products. Among many other findings, we identified what the family’s roles are when it comes to interacting with TELCO, whether it’s to communicate, sign up for or consume their products.

We discovered that, where TELCO are concerned, families work like a company and have tasks that are distributed in a very similar way to those of any company:

• Financial controller: decides what is bought or signed up for.
• Legal representative: signs the contract and represents the family.
• Office manager: takes care of the paperwork.
• TIC agent: advises on technology and solves issues and problems.
• Salesperson: tries to convince others about purchasing products.
• Consumer: uses the products.

There is not an exclusive task for each family member: rather, each member of the family unit usually takes care of a specific number of the tasks mentioned above.

Depending on which groups of tasks each member has, we can find different profiles within families. In total we identified 6 profiles, with each one in charge of their group of tasks. Among the 6 profiles identified, only one of them is absolutely self-sufficient. The 5 remaining profiles depend on each other.

These dependencies that are created between the different family members affect how they interact with TELCO and their decisions when it comes to buying and signing up for any product.

I wonder to what extent real-time CA technologies are taking into account these interdependencies between family members: because, even if they send a customer a promotion that suits their tastes, it will have to go through the filters of the other profiles who they depend on.

If it turns out that CA technologies are not considering these interdependencies because it is still not possible technologically, I would advise them to turn to customer experience design and design research teams to work together on an appropriate strategy.

Lastly, I would like to remind you that these interdependencies between family roles when it comes to interacting with TELCO is just one of the actionable findings that have come out of the investigation. At NOVUM, we are generating solutions based on these cases, but other solutions have also been devised and validated that can positively impact Telefonica’s revenue and that have emerged as a result of identifying other opportunities. And all thanks to what families as a unit of analysis reveal to us through ethnographic interviews about personalized products for TELCO, whether they can be tracked by CA or not.