Telesperience: "marketing is often ahead of IT in terms of its thinking on personalization"

     

Telesperience published a new report (commissioned by Openet and based on surveying 63 operators from around the world - see press release here) analyzing the gaps between the marketing goals of creating personalized services and the ability of their IT teams to execute the plans.

Some of the findings (see below) may not fit the trends we see in recent discussions on personalization. The #1 goal (for operator's marketing staff) is customer service, which is usually associated with churn reduction, rather than revenues and/or ARPU increase.

Only then come new offers and in 3rd place pricing plans (however real life may be different - see examples - here). QoS is #4 despite the recents ideas of the opportunity in monetizating OTT services (see "Verizon Invests $340M in OTT Video Distribution Services" - here and my next post later today).

The reports (3 in total)  "A 360 degree view of personalisation in communications” are available for download here (subscription required).

The report finds that:

• "Personalised customer support, for example, is the number one goal for marketers, and six out of ten say they can support it now; with nine out of ten saying they will be able to support it by 2013. However, as can be seen from Figure 5, IT departments are much less confident at being able to easily deliver personalised customer care today. Having said that, by 2013 a similar level of IT experts to product marketers (nine out of ten) believe they will be able to support it. Overall, though the good news is that IT is set to meet or exceed the expectations of product management and marketing in supporting all areas of personalisation, as it implements solutions that can easily and smartly meet their needs Figure 5 is very telling, as it reveals that marketing is often ahead of IT in terms of its thinking, and IT often struggles to support these plans. This is not because of a lack of willingness or capability. Product managers and marketers acknowledge that key barriers to delivering personalisation are lack of software budget and inadequacies in the legacy software infrastructure 

• "We also wanted to explore whether the most innovative companies in the sample (34% regarded themselves as being innovative) were more advanced in their support for different types of personalisation than the average for the research sample.
  
  As Figure 6 shows they were more advanced in the rollout of every aspect, although they were further ahead in some areas than in other. What was interesting though was this group of innovators did not report that making changes to existing tariffs and products were any easier than the average overall – indicating that even they could improve their performance going forward by investing in solutions that support easier real-time and dynamic personalisation".