Personalised user experiences – what's the secret sauce?

Singapore is entering an era of hyper-personalisation. According to a recent Nielson report, almost 50% of Singapore consumers are more likely to try new brands compared to five years ago and personalised experiences is one of the key factors which influences their brand choices. Digital service providers are a beacon of best practice in creating and managing digital user experience: for example Netflix Inc, YouTube and Viu have been working furiously for the past several years to ensure that each consumer has a completely unique exposure to the platform. And now, Singapore’s consumers have come to expect the same level of personalised service in all areas of their lives.

Today, the telecom operator plays a key role as a critical partner for any business. Telecom operators in Singapore are facing changing times – an influx of competition is challenging customer loyalty whilst 5G, IoT and the cloud have created new expectations for both consumers and enterprises. Rising expectations for customised services and tailored offers are causing enterprises to evaluate their telecom operator service and whether they can support their ability to deliver personalised experiences.

Most telecom operators already provide custom services at the front-end with easy-to-use customer relationship management systems, responsive customer care, and billing systems that are accurate and reliable. Yet, enterprises need to dig one level deeper and ensure that the physical infrastructure itself supports personalisation. It needs to be extremely responsive and adaptable to specific customer needs: in other words, a network that is tailored to each customer’s needs as they increasingly rely on personalised experiences when interacting with digital devices and services. For the telecom operator trying to deliver this level of individual service, the most important tool is data.

Personalisation requires data
It’s no secret that data is absolutely essential to providing personalised services. Is there a spike in traffic on Friday evenings as e-gamers come online at the end of the work week? How many more downloads can be expected prior to the launch of a new album by pop star Jay Chou? These types of insights allow telecom operators to anticipate future needs and create services accordingly. Without data, personalisation of services is not possible. Data is what feeds the knowledge that enables telecom operators to design the policies and systems that tell the network how to behave to achieve most effective outcomes.

Ensure the network can adapt and react in real-time
The network must effectively and efficiently deliver this data to back end systems and respond quickly so that it can adapt to customer needs. For example, if the new season of The Chef Show is released on Netflix, capacity must be quickly increased to allow fans of the show to have a high-quality viewing experience. Today’s networks are not designed to adjust to these growing and unpredictable demands and telecom operators are now realising the level of complexity and variability that new requirements such as 5G, IoT, and cloud services will introduce.

Legacy systems, which have been installed over the course of many years, are hindering the ability of telecom operators to deliver this level of real-time personalisation, thus limiting superior customer experiences. Very often, several manual steps are required to be completed across multiple systems to make changes or deliver any chosen network service. With many different systems, it is difficult and cumbersome to effectively monitor all systems in real time for ongoing quality assurance. This means faults and issues are often overlooked and only recognised when the operator experiences issues and complaints from end consumers. Legacy systems must be replaced by automated networks and intelligent software that can proactively adapt to usage patterns and identify and troubleshoot technical issues even before they are noticed by the consumer. By utilising automation, guided by analytics and intent-based policies, networks can rapidly scale, self-configure, and self-optimise.

Personalised experiences demand a collaborative approach to networking
A recent McKinsey study found that having the right digital tools are indispensable for the business transformation of any enterprise: the network is the most fundamental tool for modern enterprises and it must be up to the challenges of tomorrow. For enterprises in Singapore to succeed with a laser focus on digital experiences, they must work proactively and closely with the telecom operators underpinning their services to ensure that their infrastructure evolves to support personalisation.