Building a Winning DMO: How Full-stack SaaS Enables Personalization at Scale

Winning DMOs know their audience and deliver seamless experiences and flexibility. But to truly stand out, they must master one game-changing element: personalization at scale.

With tech companies raising the bar on great customer experiences, personalization has become a cornerstone of customer-centricity in telecommunications. From recent findings, customer-centric telcos can unlock up to an 8 percent uplift in revenue every year driven by higher average revenue per user (ARPU) and lower churn, lower cost to serve (10 - 15 percent), and higher customer satisfaction scores.¹

According to McKinsey, best-in-class telcos that leverage personalization maximize value at every stage of the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to retention, delivering transformative business outcomes:²

‍

But personalization at scale isn’t possible without the right foundation. This is where advanced software and analytics capabilities come into play. 

So, how can a full-stack telco operating system empower your DMO to deliver personalized, customer-first experiences? Let’s explore.

How Full-stack Supports Customer Segmentation and Identifying Sales Opportunities

Best-in-class telcos find creative ways to generate value during every moment of the customer lifecycle. Top telcos also find and optimize cross-sell and upsell opportunities whenever possible. Doing this requires granular visibility of key moments during the customer life cycle, such as knowing their web and app activity and data usage.

Data analytics empowers the creation of bottom-up, data-driven microsegments by uncovering key variables that influence the behavior of each segment. This approach enables the development of thousands of precise microsegments, paving the way for highly personalized offers and messages tailored to individual customers.¹

Ideally, your telco should have easy access to detailed customer data through an integrated data lake. However, this is often not the case as legacy telcos tend to be held back by to years of incremental software integrations with vital customer and campaign data scattered throughout the organization.

Pre-integrated full-stack software solves this by captures customer data from all telco systems into an integrated data lake to give you a 360-degree view of your customers:

In a June to July 2022 campaign, our DMO brand Circles.Life experienced how full-stack software helps personalization when we targeted heavy data users who like to use Spotify. 

From our usage data, we noticed that a segment of Spotify listeners was active every Friday at 1AM. Based on our analysis, we targeted them with a Spotify streaming bundle at a specific time and day.

As a result, our email channel saw a roughly 15% improvement in open rates and a 102% improvement in our push notifications click rate.

Our software enables us to upsell content based on a segment’s preferences. As this segment of Spotify listeners are heavy data users, we upsold unlimited data plans to them. This campaign brought in a 61 percent increase in click-through rate.

These campaigns are powered by our AI-based Customer Aggregation and Visualization tool. By analyzing more than 200 customer attributes, this tool can suggest microsegments and customer insights to power personalized marketing campaigns.

Look for Full-stack Software That Comes With a Fit-for-Purpose Martech Stack

Telcos tend to build complicated martech stacks and amass lots of data. However, data collection can be an endless exercise if it does not have a clear business objective.

To build a winning DMO, your personalization leader must carefully consider your desired marketing outcomes and build your martech stack around that. 

Instead of adopting a ‘spray and pray’ marketing campaign, personalization leaders can target a more sharply defined set of customer outcomes and build campaigns and use cases to support those. They can then build data and martech stack roadmaps around these use cases.²

Having a clear idea of what you need and working backward is a good start, but you can also look out for experienced partners. Some telco software providers use full-stack SaaS platforms to power their DMO marketing campaigns.

With the integrated data lake that full-stack software provides, your marketing campaigns can leverage the depth of user data that you have collected. This data ranges from mobile device type, web activity, actual mobile plan usage, and even your user’s geographical location.

Full-stack telco operating systems come pre-integrated with a mobile app, website data tracking, and a martech stack. These integrations, powered by consumer insights from the integrated data lake, enable contextual offers ranging from automated digital marketing, in-app offers, and predictive churn prevention campaigns. 

With these functions pre-integrated, Circles.Life did a campaign in June 2022 targeting users visiting travel-related websites twice or more times in the past month. Compared to the control group, we saw a 27 percent increase in conversion rates.

Agile Full-stack SaaS Providers Are Capable of Rapid Activation

Burdened by cumbersome legacy systems, most telco operators react slowly to customer signals. Due to the manual nature of updating legacy telco systems, it can take a month or longer to record and process customer information. An additional four to six weeks are required to launch a campaign based on that information.²

Working with an agile, full-stack telco SaaS provider can remove the complexity of launching new campaigns. A full-stack solution allows telcos to rapidly implement changes and updates to the system such as launching new mobile plans or products over the weekend. 

One key feature you should look out for is templated product definitions. Templated product definitions refer to a single template that can support multiple offers combinations. In the past, telcos ended up with separate products for every product permutation, leading to thousands of products in their catalog, eventually becoming unmanageable. Having a templated product definition gives you the customisation without the unmanageable product catalog.

Using a full-stack SaaS approach reduces the need to coordinate updates and integrations with multiple system integrators, reducing the time it takes to launch new products. This approach keeps costs low by leveraging SaaS-based telco software built with modern components.

This approach was used in Singapore when Circles.Life noted that customers were asking for more data, smaller SMS bundles, and unlimited calls. Over two years, our full-stack software enabled our product team to rapidly launch several new products and features meeting these demands. You can read more about it on Hire Digital.

In summary, a full-stack software approach is able to support three essential factors for personalization:²

With all telco functional layers pre-integrated, data can be funneled directly into an integrated data lake. This data lake's insights can power automated campaigns and interventions within the app, such as personalized offers and churn intervention campaigns. 

Finally, the integrated martech layer allows for personalized campaigns built on customer signals and microsegments developed from machine learning and data analytics.

At Circles, we developed our own software from the ground up when we recognized that existing solutions couldn't deliver the level of customization and personalization we envisioned for our customers. By designing it in-house, we ensured that all components were seamlessly pre-integrated. You can read more about this story here.

Our telco partners around the world, such as Japan, Indonesia, and the Middle East, now use our full-stack telco operating system to power their high-NPS customer experiences with rapid times-to-market.

Don’t miss out on learning how full-stack SaaS can help your DMO. 

Contact us today!