STC Drives Enhanced User Experience With New Customer-Centric Platform

The vast majority of digital transformation initiatives share at least one common goal: Delivering the best possible customer experience.

That’s true in virtually any consumer-facing business – and telecom companies are no exception.

In fact, this is especially true for operators, who not only are navigating their own digital transformation journeys but also enabling the digital lives of their customers. Add to this the massive amounts of data; telcos have – about their users, their networks, their services, usage habits and more – and you’ve got a recipe for next- generation customer experiences that meet or exceed the expectations of the modern consumer.

That’s the context around Saudi Telecom Company’s (stc) recent investments in its customer experience. stc, working with its partner Huawei, recently upgraded and transformed its existing big data platform into a Customer-Centric Platform (CCP) – a strategic approach to modernizing its data analytics and insights capabilities.

The CCP approach offered two overarching advantages while balancing cost and data value considerations. According to stc. First, the CCP unifies and democratizes data that was previously stored in disparate silos and more difficult to derive value from. That led to the second primary benefit: granular, actionable insights about customer experience that allow for more granular marketing segmentation and personalization.

Moreover, the CCP was built on existing systems and hardware, while consolidating diverse software and tooling to optimize CAPEX/OPEX now and in the future. This is generating a sustainable series of short-term and long-term benefits for stc’s business and its customers’ experience & satisfaction as well. In addition to CAPEX/OPEX optimization, the upsides include:

• Greater scalability: Previously, customer growth – a positive for any operator – meant labor-intensive system upgrades were needed. Now, stc’s CCP can scale seamlessly as its customer base grows and demands
• Cutting-edge technology: The CCP leverages numerous leading open source components, including cutting edge cloud-native technologies that excite employees and deliver better experiences for customers. Approximately 90% of software components in the CCP are open source, reducing CAPEX requirements as well.

• Real-time data and analytics: Siloed data management makes it virtually impossible to deliver and act on data products and insights in real time. Consolidating on a single platform unlocks real-time data for insights, event monitoring, and other business-critical
• Micro-segmentation and personas: A combination of unified data models and hyper-specific segmentation enables stc to create personas at the individual customer level, creating more compelling experiences and care while also boosting lifetime customer
• Solution Sustainability: CCP is highly sustainable solution with consolidated data set from all across organization to enable different business unit . This not only is sustainable with least amount of changes and hardware additions for each new requirement but also environment friendly with lower carbon foot

The upgrade is already paying dividends, delivering positive ROI within three months. For starters, the unified view of all behavioral, psychotropic, and usage data is enabling a treasure trove of new marketing campaigns and customer experience strategies – something that will continue to grow and evolve over time. For example, the new platform has enabled stc to better detect high-value customers who indicate a higher risk of churn and automatically trigger retention campaigns, reducing churn by 40%.

The CCP has also shown results in terms of event monitoring. stc anticipates cost savings of hundreds SAR million in 2023 as a direct result of faster fraud prevention enabled by the consolidated data platform.

A CLI refilling use case alone avoided several millions SAR in revenue leakage thanks to the CCP.

The new solution also makes a major difference in Wangiri (one ring and drop) – related impacts – while Wangiri fraud is conducted by third parties, operators tend to bear the blame when customers receive unexpected bills, causing reputation harm and increased churn. stc has cut Wangiri-related churn in half with its new CCP.