Thought Leadership

It seems unlikely that telcos are a rich breeding ground for the next set of breakthroughs in AI, but they are, they just don’t know it.

Nowadays words like “agile”, “lean”, “scrum” or “kanban” have been abused so many times that some of its initial values or ideas have been lost. Many people think (and say) they are agile because they do stand-ups; some others are trying to come up with new “smart” acronyms (SAFe, LeSS…) for unknown reasons (because the old buzzwords don’t sell anymore?)

It’s 2017, and you would have thought that creating evidence-based systems of decision has never been easier. After all aren’t the FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix & Google) doing this day in day out? Aren’t closed loop digital systems all hooked up with continual measurement, and isn’t every vendor under the sun promising you it’s easy? It can’t be that difficult!

This is the dream: you put vast troves of data to work, accurately predicting each customer’s wants and desires, creating individually tailored marketing, sales, and service. You solve problems before they become problems. You operate like a nimble and personalised small business, but at massive scale. Your customers love you. Your competitors wither away.

Are you a troubled developer because your boss heard about BigData and is asking you about it? Are you a CEO who just wants an understandable explanation about the CAP theorem? Are you the partner of a developer who just wants to understand what he/she is doing?

If attention is the new currency, there simply isn’t enough of it to go around. Click-through rates are in the gutter, adblock use is growing, free reach on social isn’t free anymore, and organic search traffic is declining.

Many customer actions leave a digital imprint — a sort of data exhaust. Content consumption produces weblogs, purchases make transaction records, and smartphones generate coordinates.

These days, the main discernible difference between two telco brands is often the way they treat their customers. We talk about enhancing the ‘customer experience’ and improving the ‘customer journey’ – but creating a real stand-out amongst competitors depends on developing a much deeper, more human-like understanding of customers than ever before. Telcos know that […]