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CASE STUDY: Personalization in Consumer Engagement

Wireless telephony has become a commoditized marketplace where carriers compete
aggressively to acquire and retain new customers. As fickle as consumers can be,
understanding customer behavior to optimize growth and retention strategies has always been
an aspirational goal. Customers provide voluminous data about their concerns but limitations in
the analytics tools available to the enterprise make data about individual customer preferences
un-actionable. The ability to now model a single consumer alters this landscape, enabling
contextually relevant and adaptive one-on-one personalized communication at scale.

Discourse Analytics (DA) was engaged by a third-party Customer
Engagement Management Company (NLP-CO) with its own proprietary
Natural Language Processing Engine (NLP). NLP-CO is able to capture
macro-data about trends in customer sentiment. But the macro-data does
not yield intelligence that is actionable at the consumer level. NLP-CO asked
DA to analyze customer feedback data from a leading wireless telephone
service provider (Telco) to understand and develop actionable profile data on Telcos
customers. Based on the content in the feedback repository, DA engine identified four key
drivers that guided customer perceptions of Telcos wireless service. These drivers were i) Cost
(data plan, fees); ii) Customer Service (call quality, coverage, connectivity); iii) Quality of Service
(agent comments, bill pay, escalation); and iv) Product Functionality (automation, apps, battery
life, camera).

By analyzing the Telcos data using our Customer Activation Platform/Discrete Data Affirmation
Engine, Discourse Analytics: i) built individualized attitudinal profiles of customers along the
key drivers, and appended these profiles to the original customer record; ii) identified distinct
clusters of customers with similar profiles; and iii) assessed longitudinal trends in profiles at
both an individual and cluster level (and the resulting brand perception). By mapping the
customer mindset and identifying clusters of like-minded customers, the Customer Service
team was able to assess likely churn, and proactively deploy strategies to mitigate it.

Figure 1 User profile


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METHODOLOGY

DA analyzed 16,816 comments submitted by 3,962 Telco customers that was collected over a
period of 12 months. Customers submitted their feedback and opinions through a customer
service portal. The raw text of their comments was processed by NLP-CO which identified 73
distinct concepts as well as positive and negative sentiments around each. These 73 concepts
were grouped into four profile nodes to map the customers attitudinal profiles. A k-means
clustering algorithm was used to identify clusters of similar profiles.

INSIGHTS ON TELCOS CUSTOMERS

Attitudinal Profiles
Figure 2 shows customer leanings along each of the key brand perception drivers. As shown,
customers had moderate feelings about cost, quality and product functionality, but a definite
negative perception of customer service. This is clearly something that the Telcos customer
care group should be concerned about.

Figure 2: Key Brand Perception Drivers and Customer Leanings



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Primary Clusters
The DA Engine identified three distinct clusters of customers with similar profiles:
A large group of customers (55%) with low activity levels and generally negative
impressions;
A group of customers (20%) with generally positive views and moderate level of activity;
and
A small group of customers (2%) with moderate views and very high level of activity
The clusters are shown in Figure 3. Because clusters are tied to attitudinal preferences as
expressed by actual customers, Telcos customer care professionals can develop campaigns to
address customer concerns that speak directly to customer needs, and not generically to
everyone in the at-risk customer population. Retention of at-risk customers can be as simple as
modifying the messaging to address the specific need or mindset. The DA customer activation
framework allows for making adjustments to the broad campaign themes to personalize the
messages to individuals within each cluster.

Figure 3: Clusters of Similar Attitudinal Profiles





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Trends in Customer Perception
The DA Engine also identified that over a period of one year, customer perception on the
quality and diversity of products, as well as the cost aspects improved for most customers.
However, the analysis highlighted a downward trend in perception of customer service. This is
shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Trends in Attitudinal Profiles

This knowledge would enable the customer care team to review the customer service
processes and identify specific issues that stand in the way of positive brand perception.

CONCLUSION
Brand loyalty is an increasingly ephemeral concept that becomes more difficult to track
in industries that suffer from commoditization, such as wireless telephony. Fickle
customers face low barriers to switching, forcing brands to be more attentive to
customer sentiment to attract and retain customers. DA enables brands to take
customer interaction data and identify what matters most to customers. With these
insights, brands can design products, services, experiences and campaigns in complete
alignment with individual customer profiles.