Telecoms are considered one of the most highly competitive industry. Price is no longer an effective differentiator. That’s why customer experience is what telecom companies are moving towards.
A study from Analysys Mason showed that every one percent increase in telco’s Net Promoter Score results in a four percent decrease in churn. It means that brands should understand more customers individually.
dtac’s SATYA project was formed with the mix of different unit employees – market insight, prepaid and postpaid market and brand communications – to identify its customer segments and find out the shared values between dtac and its customers. And that’s the first step of understanding its customers.
And one of project members was Kasidis Satangmongkol, a data scientist in the customer value management division. He oversaw dtac’s customer segmentation, allowing a better understanding of its 20 million customers.
“Customer segmentation was conducted by both quantitative and qualitative research to measure customer attitudes and behavior. Subsequently, we brought a huge amount of collected customer data usage to match with each segment,” he said.
From the research, five segments were identified:
- Offliner
They are mostly retirees residing upcountry. National TV channels and other traditional media remain their main consumption. But they still use feature phone to communicate with their family.
- Digital Aspirants
They are working class people, like street food owners, motorcycle taxi drivers and housekeepers. They find that social media is a whole new world of entertainment and spend a lot of time on Youtube.
- Sufficient digital
This group of customers is similar to digital aspirants. They are rural migrant workers living in Bangkok urban upcountry. A happy simple family life is key to them. They are concerned about life stability and financial management.
- Give me the best
White collars and entrepreneurs in this demanding group are obsessed with success in life, and appreciate having a strong sense of control. Always busy to get things done, they need services that go beyond the basics.
- Mobile buddy
University students represent this segment of customers best. They are always online, which is a major source of entertainment, information and a place for self-expression.
To make data more accurate and personalized, dtac integrated market and customer insight data with technical data collected by TG, such as dropped calls and latency, leading to better understanding of customer demands. This resulted in a decrease in churn rates.
However, challenges remains as existing sets of data are relevant to a certain level of customer insights, and must be further refined to yield additional insights.
From economist to data scientist
With a strong interest and obsession in data, Kasidis’ data scientist career actually started from being an economics student three years ago. And that’s why he is familiar with dealing with a large amount of data.
He added data science and statistics shared the same concept – data collection, data cleaning, analyzing and report – to get insight from datasets. But today, data science has become a buzzword due to better data collection methods, fuelled by advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence.
Apart from being data scientist at dtac, he also manages the Facebook Fanpage titled data rockie with the aim of knowledge sharing about statistics, data science and coding. With this strong passion, it drove him to encourage himself to broaden horizons by taking online courses. Today, his Facebook has more than 60,000 fans.