5 Ways Process Mining Improves Customer Lifetime Value for Telcos

Are you in telecommunications? Then you probably know that customer retention is a hot topic within the industry.

The influx of competitors, the introduction of 5G networking speeds, and the explosion in the number of internet of things (IoT) connected devices have made it a complex and crowded market to compete in.

The customer journey matters more now than ever before.

To ensure your customers stay loyal, you need to provide the best possible experience and, thus, increase the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Mapping the entire customer journey is a key first step.

With CLV as the key metric, you take a slightly longer term view of the relationship between your company and your customers. It shifts the focus from short-term profit margins to the long-term health of the customer relationship as a whole.

And here are 5 ways Process Mining can help you improve your CLV.

1. Keeping the Existing Customers With Excellent Customer Journey

Experts estimate that it’s 5 to 25 times more costly to obtain a single new client than to maintain a good relationship with an existing one.

The costs associated with finding new telecom customers revolve around sign-ups:

• the hours spent on paperwork porting existing phone numbers and other tech support;
• answering questions about billing;
• navigating the new customer portal, and so on.

The longer the customer stays with you, the lower the cost of retention as you amortize these costs over the life of the customer. In a subscription service sector like telecommunications, retention is all about preventing customers from leaving.

By analyzing your customer-facing processes, you’ll get a real-time picture of what each touchpoint looks like, complete with the areas that could be improved.

An excellent customer journey is the best way to ensure that your customers will stick around.

2. Touchpoints Are Crucial to Successful Customer Retention

Every time customers reach out, whether via phone, email, mention on social media, or review on Yelp, it is essential they have a positive experience. Even if they’re complaining, how your company reacts is of the utmost importance for CLV.

64% of people surveyed say they value customer experience over price. That means a satisfied customer will gladly pay more for service from a company that treats them right.

Mapping critical touchpoints enables you to know precisely where they are interacting with your company, and how each interaction goes.

Knowing that a mention on Twitter led to an unhappy customer, because nobody ever responded, means you need to improve your social media presence. And knowing that it takes two days for customer service emails to be answered means you need to put more effort into streamlining that workflow.

3. Company-Wide Data Integration with Process Mining

By combining IT records for data breadcrumbs relating to a certain business process, Process Mining brings together disparate information from across the company.

One process may involve sales, customer service, tech support, and operations. Before, this data may have been located in various databases not accessible to other teams. But Process Mining highlights the inter-relational nature of the process.

The interactive process map can be used as the basis for creating your customer journey map.

And once the locations of all the necessary data are discovered, the work can begin to create a single source of truth (SSOT) where you can store all relevant customer information. Then, no matter what department is contacted, that team will have access to what they need to answer to the customer’s question or restore their service quickly and efficiently.

4. Don’t Map Just the Customer-Facing Processes. Why?

Back-office processes impact the customer’s journey, too. Yet, they are often overlooked in customer service and customer journey mapping.

For example, think about service work on a tower. Just because a customer may not live in the service area served by a tower that needs work, doesn’t mean their life won’t be impacted by the tower being down for a day.

By creating maps of each of these processes, the overlap with customer-facing processes like billing or tech support becomes clear. And this clarity will help you proactively ensure satisfied customers, even when their service goes down for a time.

5. Process Mining Helps you Differentiate Between Target Audiences

Perhaps the single biggest benefit to Process Mining is that it gives you easy access to see not only where your crucial customer interactions are taking place, but also precisely which customers are using which processes and channels to connect with your company.

Having this information lets you customize each touchpoint for the specific group who uses that communication method.

Say your customer journey map says the automated FAQ chatbot is used predominantly by males ages 18–34 (mainly because they’re more likely to be up after hours gaming), while your office hours live chat is mostly seeing female users between 28–42 (who tend to like the less personal nature of chat because the CSR doesn’t know who they are).

Now you can tailor these channels to these demographics to further enhance their experience when they contact you for help.

Maybe you make the first questions the chatbot asks be about gaming-related service issues, or the live chat operators can use gender nonspecific language when starting a chat.

How Do You Approach CLV?

As you can see, a customer journey map powered by Process Mining is a great resource to add to your customer experience arsenal.

Whether it’s knowing where each and every customer touchpoint is, or being able to customize those interactions based on the segment of your user base known to frequent each channel. The information gained is essential to improving customer retention and extending the CLV of your telecom subscribers.

In your company, do you take into consideration CLV? How do you make sure your customers stay loyal? Let us know in the comments!

Interested to find out more about Process Mining’s benefits in telco? Read our guide to the telecommunications industry that can help you uncover it all.