Service Sales in Telecom billing sector Data Analysis tools shattered myths & set the perspective right
Overview
Telecom usage billing is a sale of service. Mobiles, Internet usage, broadband usage, along various other communication services are billed to the customer depending on their usage. There are two broad-brush categories of billing – Pre-Paid & Post-Paid. Many types & categories of services are there within the two broad categories. Their usage is measured in seconds or pulses and customers pay based on that. Sales departments of various service providers invest in campaigns and advertisements and measure the sales they acquire from the customers. Meticulous accounting is the key to billing a customer and gaining the confidence and loyalty of each customer.
The company in the Case study:
A giant service provider in telecom in Russia who has products in all possible wireless communication technology is the case we could reach out with the tool Office Solution. Their business analysts analyzed the data and they and our team in Ms. Office Solution Solutions (P) Ltd, were really amazed to find knowledge snippets that not only shattered our commonly acquired misconceptions but did really find the quantitative differential values within the different ranges, dimensions and other measures.
Experience of Office Solution:
Office Solution provided the analysts with the tool and the know-how to go about with the tool. The analysts of the company had the privilege to run & familiarize themselves with various case studies, examples and ton-fro discussions. They embarked on them newly gain knowledge and within weeks they came out with startling inferences- the inferences that were not only mathematically interesting but business-wise very revealing and path-breaking.
What startled us:
In this industry, the overarching fact is the revenue earned. This single fact is qualified by many dimensions starting from Line-of-Business [Pre/Post paid], category of service, call-direction, even regions, and many others. So the primary approach was to bring up a kind of comparison of the revenue earnings qualified through these dimensions. Then we found out some general tests in terms of ratios and coefficients and did the next deep level of comparison.
We then classified the results with respect to derived measures and found the variations from generally held misconceptions.
1. We found that even today Post-paid connections are more popular and more revenue giving than the Pre-paid ones.
2. We figured that only in the case of GSM roaming the pre-paid ones triumph over the post-paid ones. This might tell us that people use Post-Paid connections for resident use and use a different pre-paid SIM when they are on the move, this way they keep a tab on their usage and cost. We have found that STD calls bring in more revenue than other types of calls.
3. We found that the niche and hi-tech services are not that revenue earning compared to the traditional and simple calls.
4. Our popular misconception was that the young subscribers actually are the most revenue givers- it is not, even fancy type services are far lower in the significance rank – at least for this company.
Through our tool, we could compare between two facts i.e. measuring one fact when the other fact is reconfigured as a dimension. We found a complex curve that does not follow any regular polynomial expression. But we could easily extrapolate the last values in a small neighborhood and can predict the next value [in that small neighborhood]. This had been found to be more accurate than a statistically averaged out-trend through normal correlation exercises. So, this kind of data depiction has provided more significant predictions, although in a proximate neighborhood assuming no fast and drastic changes take place. These are very important decision enabling points that actually changed the companies orientation in service and re-focusing much beyond the grapevine gossip that we most often confuse as market intelligence. Empirical data and their flexible analysis has given more wisdom than hearsay in Sales of services in Telecom industry.
