Extra tags: data
Authored by: Geoff Soon, Senior District Manager for ASEAN, Snowflake
Telecommunications network operators generate a vast amount of data related to service use, and this data can provide insights of significant value, particularly given the digital transformation and data-driven initiatives of business customers. Sharing this data can unlock new revenue streams and, if done seamlessly, can empower business decision-making with a level of agility not previously possible. By taking a data-driven approach, telecommunications companies can embrace data and successfully monetise their existing and future investments.
From mobile networks to handset providers, telecommunications organisations are using data to keep pace with evolving client expectations. In Singapore, the country’s first digital network operator M1, sought Snowflake’s Software as a Service (SaaS) to enable hyper-personalisation by concentrating data to a single source of truth (SSOT), in a bid to modernise its data environment.
Providing a suite of services to over 2 million customers, the digital-first company, a subsidiary of Keppel Corporation, has its sights set firmly on transforming the country's telecommunications landscape.
As part of a digital transformation initiative, M1 began migrating its applications to the cloud but continued storing data in on-premises databases, which inhibited users from accessing near real-time insights and leveraging advanced analytical tools.
Creating new reports was a complex endeavour and required significant support from the IT team, compounding issues further.
Furthermore, multiple sources of truth also negatively impacted the efficiency of M1’s data scientists, while system upgrades, compatibility troubleshooting and ongoing infrastructure maintenance diverted technical talent from increasing analytics.
With these challenges, what are some ways in which data can improve operational efficiency to benefit from becoming more agile, improving customer-value management, service assurance and beyond?
Making Data-Driven Decisions
Organisations from online retailers to sports teams are applying proactive data-driven decisions to their operations with great success. Businesses today are using not just their first-party data but also second and third-party data in their operations, from managing supply chains to running sales and marketing campaigns. In the process, they are improving the operational efficiency experienced at telecommunications companies today, where making data-driven business-wide decisions can be challenging.
Through implementing a similar data-driven approach, telecommunications operators stand to benefit by becoming more agile in areas, including customer-value management, service assurance, retail and beyond. Making organisational-wide decisions, though, requires access to all data across the organisation, which can be a common challenge due to data silos that cater to different business units and distinct services. The increasing data volumes from 5G and the accompanying semi-structured network and application data exacerbate the challenge. Building a single source of truth for first-party data, which can then be enhanced with second and third-party data, including cross-cloud data, is imperative for delivering business-wide benefits like those seen in other sectors. Telecommunications operators can then improve network design, predict heavy network usage, and analyse customer churn.
Modern data platforms can drive the transition towards these digital processes. They deliver the scale and elasticity to meet high volume, low latency and variable throughput needs of applications that underpin digital processes. Leveraging modern data infrastructure allows telecommunications organisations to transform legacy processes in areas that span sales onboarding to billing management to customer support. It also empowers end-users with modern digital experiences and offloads internal support functions.
Snowflake's Data Cloud enhances decision-making by providing a single platform to meet the data needs of enterprises. Without requiring hardware or specialised software, Snowflake offers a simple, simultaneous and powerful service to meet the data needs of businesses. Uniquely, its infrastructure decouples the compute and storage layers allowing them to be scaled independently, giving businesses more options to choose and settle on a plan that fits their needs.
Through the removal of complex data pipeline tools in favour of flexibility and efficiency, Snowflake's architecture facilitates operational efficiency and business intelligence. Firms now have at their fingertips the visibility of the customer, and both operational and transactional data. This enables them to understand their customers better, evaluate the products that work, and gauge more precisely the market interest levels of products and services. By pioneering the Data Cloud, Snowflake offers businesses the potential to optimise customer databases and factor in consumer behaviour into product development. Simply put, the potential for performance, scalability, and analytics support is endless.
Putting data to good use is vital for success and telecommunications organisations have vast quantities of underutilised data. It becomes critical for organisations to be able to utilise tools that optimise data by allowing it to flow freely. Businesses must ensure they are ideally positioned to use their data to enable innovation and monetisation – and for telecommunications organisations and others dealing with sensitive information – without sacrificing data privacy and protection. This is fundamental to achieving growth. With customer service needs and expectations evolving at a rapid pace, telecommunications companies that invest in staying ahead of the curve will reap the benefits of being in a position to meet this demand.
M1 is a shining example of this. By leveraging Snowflake’s capabilities to house its data lake and data warehouse via aggregation to a single source of truth, it was able to power a variety of data-driven use cases. Snowflake’s services equipped M1 to piece together a more complete view of its customers’ experience by combining data from M1’s customer relationship management system (CRM), billing systems, website, and mobile app.
The fine-grained, role-based access control, and column-level security provided by Snowflake also helped M1 protect sensitive data and maintain compliance.
Meanwhile, M1’s data scientists spent less time looking for data and more time building statistical models that deliver value. In short, its data scientists were able to focus more on data science work and deliver timely, true value to the business.
Thanks to hyper-personalisation powered by real-time data, M1 was able to improve their response time and derive valuable new insights through Snowflake’s transaction data.
As we navigate through an evolving post-pandemic environment, the companies that are increasingly data-driven and able to make near real-time decisions will become more agile, successful, and resilient. By being able to process data from customers and operations, and enable innovation, telecommunications operators with the ability to pre-empt and respond to dynamic changes to market conditions will be differentiated.
Furthermore, in the face of increasing threats to data privacy and protection, and development of data governance landscape, telecommunications operators need a robust, secure, and agile platform that is high on functionality, performance, and results.
